Onboarding

The interface, redrawn

The UI font moved from monospace to a system sans-serif — larger, with more breathing room. It reads like a place you’d write and talk, not a terminal. Contrast is properly tuned now: secondary text is actually readable instead of fading into the background. Sidebar labels are in plain Title Case, and the old Unicode symbol-icons (◈ ⟐ ⌕) are replaced with a clean, consistent icon set.

Themes, redesigned

Vega’s themes were, honestly, chosen more by feeling than by design. The three based on well-known palettes — Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox — held up fine. The four I’d built myself did not.

layered backgrounds so panels and cards have depth, a genuine text hierarchy, contrast that’s been measured rather than guessed. Midnight — the default — went from a flat near-black to a deeper, considered blue-black.

A new theme: Reader

There’s also a new one. Reader is a warm, low-glare cream theme built for comfortable long reading — closer to a printed page than a screen. If you use Vega for long-form articles, it’s worth a try.

Easy-Read Font

In Settings there’s a new accessibility option: Easy-Read Font. It switches the interface to Atkinson Hyperlegible — a typeface the Braille Institute designed for legibility, with letterforms built so b/d and p/q don’t blur together — plus a little extra letter spacing. It’s meant for dyslexic readers, but it helps anyone reading for a long stretch.

Smoother feed, and smaller things

The feed had some rough edges while scrolling — cards could overlap or flicker. Those are fixed; scrolling is smooth and stable now.

A few more: onboarding shows a progress indicator and lets you back up your key later instead of forcing it up front; and your secret key is now viewable in Settings → Identity, so you can back it up or move to another client any time.

Nothing it does changed

None of this changes what Vega does — same client, same features, same protocol. What changed is how it feels to use, and how it looks the first time you see it. For an app trying to earn a place on people’s desktops, that turned out to matter more than I wanted to admit.

v0.13 auto-updates if you’re already running Vega. New here — it’s at veganostr.com and on GitHub, for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Open source, MIT, built solo.

If Vega’s useful to you, a zap or a GitHub star genuinely helps.