Codex Skin gives Hermes Desktop a Codex-inspired theme and chat layout while preserving Hermes' native behavior. It adds selectable light/dark palettes, an optional 736 px composer, cleaner voice and status surfaces, denser Tasks and Queue presentation, and four-line message folding.
Important
This project is an independent community plugin. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nous Research or OpenAI.
Stable. Version 1.1.0 has been exercised in Hermes Desktop and is covered by an automated regression suite. It uses Hermes' supported desktop plugin entry point, but some styling depends on internal DOM attributes that may change in future Hermes releases.
- A selectable Codex Skin theme in Settings → Appearance, with light and dark palettes
- Chat typography, spacing, sidebar, composer, Queue, bubbles, menus and loaders
- Codex-style model name in the composer
- Hermes' native model and Thinking Level menus after clicking the model name
- Hermes' native auto-speak and wake-word controls inside the composer
- Cleaner styling for Hermes' native Voice dictation and Reading aloud surfaces
- Pixel-matched 736 CSS px Codex composer, with an optional native-width Hermes mode
- User-message clamp at 4 lines / 110 px, with a Show more control for longer messages
- Styling for Tasks, Background activity, Clarify, Approval and media surfaces
| Setting | Values | Default | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Codex Skin | On / Off | On after installation | Settings → Plugins |
| Theme | Codex Skin / another Hermes theme | Hermes choice | Settings → Appearance |
| Composer width | Codex / Hermes | Codex | Command palette |
Turning Codex Skin off restores Hermes' normal appearance.
Open the command palette and run Codex Skin: Composer width. The row shows the active mode and the choice persists locally.
- Codex uses the measured Codex width of 736 CSS px, with responsive 16 px minimum side gutters.
- Hermes restores Hermes' native full-width composer and conversation column.
The + menu above the composer follows the rendered composer width in both modes.
Demo weather steps used only to show the Tasks layout.
- It does not replace Hermes' model or Thinking Level selection logic.
- It preserves Hermes' native assistant-turn rendering.
- It does not own, persist, replay, remove or migrate queued prompts; Queue behavior remains Hermes-native.
- It does not modify Hermes source files.
- It does not use a backend, network requests or external assets.
- Hermes Desktop with the Desktop Plugin SDK
- A local Hermes profile directory
Current Hermes Desktop releases can install Git repositories directly. Older releases can still use the manual disk install below.
Open Settings → Plugins → Install plugin and paste this exact repository subdirectory:
FPSUnleashed/hermes-codex-skin/codex-chat-look
The /codex-chat-look suffix matters because the desktop entry lives in that folder. Do not save or paste GitHub's /blob/.../plugin.js web page as the plugin file: it is HTML and Hermes will report Unexpected token '<' when it tries to load it.
PLUGIN_DIR="${HERMES_HOME:-$HOME/.hermes}/desktop-plugins/codex-chat-look"
mkdir -p "$PLUGIN_DIR"
curl -fsSL \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FPSUnleashed/hermes-codex-skin/main/codex-chat-look/plugin.js \
-o "$PLUGIN_DIR/plugin.js"For a named profile, use:
~/.hermes/profiles/<profile>/desktop-plugins/codex-chat-look/plugin.js
$pluginDir = Join-Path $HOME ".hermes\desktop-plugins\codex-chat-look"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $pluginDir | Out-Null
Invoke-WebRequest `
-Uri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FPSUnleashed/hermes-codex-skin/main/codex-chat-look/plugin.js" `
-OutFile (Join-Path $pluginDir "plugin.js")Hermes watches the plugin folder and should load the file automatically. If it does not, open the command palette and run Reload desktop plugins. You can enable or disable it live under Settings → Plugins.
Important
Installing or enabling the plugin and selecting its theme are separate steps. After installation, open Settings → Appearance and select Codex Skin. If another theme remains selected, the plugin is active but its complete Codex light/dark palette is not.
Run the relevant install command again. Hermes hot-reloads the replaced file. Compare its SHA-256 against CHECKSUMS.sha256 when you want byte-level verification.
Disable Codex Skin under Settings → Plugins, then remove its folder:
rm -rf "${HERMES_HOME:-$HOME/.hermes}/desktop-plugins/codex-chat-look"Remove-Item -Recurse -Force (Join-Path $HOME ".hermes\desktop-plugins\codex-chat-look")Run Reload desktop plugins if Hermes does not unload it automatically.
Desktop plugins execute inside the Hermes renderer and therefore carry the same local authority as the app. Review local plugins before installing them.
This plugin performs no network requests and stores no message text, prompt hashes or content fingerprints. It keeps a bounded local list of profile/session/message IDs for user messages that were manually expanded, capped at 250 entries, plus the Composer width preference.
The plugin is scoped behind html[data-codex-chat-look='true'] and cleans up its runtime markers when disabled. It is self-contained, but it styles internal Hermes surfaces. A future Hermes UI update can require selector maintenance even when the official plugin loader remains compatible.
The internal plugin ID, theme ID and installation folder remain codex-chat-look / codex-chat so existing installations update in place.
Queue persistence and transcript rehydration are owned by Hermes Desktop, not this skin. Some current Hermes builds can lose the visible queued rows after switching or reloading a compressed chat, or fail to show a message that was sent while that chat was in the background. Codex Skin does not write Queue data and this release does not claim to fix that native session-routing bug.
See CONTRIBUTING.md. Bug reports should include the Hermes version, operating system, exact reproduction steps and a screenshot with private content removed.