Theming & Modding
Customizing the look, feel, and behavior of your BBS
Maximus NG is designed to be deeply customizable. Every color, prompt, menu screen, area listing format, and lightbar behavior can be tweaked without touching source code. This section covers all the knobs.
Theme Colors
The semantic color system lets you define named color slots (|pr for prompt,
|er for error, |hd for heading, etc.) in a single file and have them
applied everywhere — menus, prompts, status lines, area listings, and language
strings.
- Theme Colors — how the color system works,
the 25-slot reference,
colors.tomlconfiguration, and editing colors in maxcfg
Language Strings
Every prompt, error message, status line, and menu label the BBS displays comes from a language TOML file. You can customize every string your callers see.
- Language Files (TOML) — the language string system, positional parameters, parameter metadata, and the delta overlay architecture
- Language Editor — editing strings interactively in maxcfg
Lightbar Customization
Lightbar mode gives your callers a modern, arrow-key-driven selection
experience for area lists and the message reader. The display.toml settings
covered here control area-list and reader lightbar — menus have their own
per-menu lightbar settings under [custom_menu] (see
Lightbar Menus in Configuration).
- Lightbar Customization — enabling and
configuring lightbar mode in
display.toml, highlight styles, boundaries, and custom screens
Display Customization
Beyond the obvious display files and menus, Maximus has a number of
less-visible configuration points that control how area listings, headers,
footers, date/time formats, and file listings are rendered. These live in
display_files.toml and are easy to overlook.
- Display Customization — area
list format strings, headers, footers, date/time formats, and other hidden
configuration points in
display_files.toml
Display Files & Codes
Display files are the compiled screens (login banners, menus, help pages) and display codes are the pipe sequences used inside them.
- Display Codes — pipe codes, info codes, and formatting operators
- Display Files — working with
.mecsource, MECCA compilation, and ANSI art
See Also
- Color Codes — numeric pipe colors and theme color code reference
- Configuration — core BBS settings
- Directory Structure — where configuration and display files live