Themes

Themes recolors the whole OpenKnowledge interface with a base16 palette. It's a user plugin: on by default, personal to your device, never committed.

Open Settings → Plugins → Themes. The page is a gallery of tiles: Default, the built-ins (Dracula, Catppuccin Frappé, Catppuccin Latte, Monokai, Gruvbox, Solarized), and any themes you've created, plus a Create new theme tile.

One palette per mode

Every tile carries a sun and a moon: the sun assigns that palette to light mode, the moon to dark mode. Clicking the tile itself assigns it to whichever mode is currently active. The light/dark switch in Settings → Preferences decides which of the two slots is live. On System, your OS does, so the palette follows the OS appearance.

A palette forces its own light or dark variant wherever it sits. Put Dracula in the light slot and switching to light mode shows Dracula's dark colors: the slot decides when a palette applies, and the palette decides how it looks. Default means no palette: the base stylesheet shows through.

Palette colors never change your Light, Dark, or System preference. That preference controls the light/dark identity used by native window chrome and operating-system integration. The active palette also colors the window background on Windows and Linux, plus the title-bar controls on Windows.

Selections are saved to your user config as appearance.colorThemeLight / appearance.colorThemeDark. See the configuration reference.

Create your own

Click Create new theme, name it, and the editor opens. Two ways to fill it in:

• Paste a scheme. The paste box accepts any Tinted Theming base16 scheme (hundreds are published), in either the current layout (palette: nested) or the original chriskempson one, YAML or JSON.
• Edit the sixteen slots by hand. Each base00–base0F slot names its role. Edits apply live and save automatically.

Four slots also color status: base0B success, base0A warning, base08 errors and base0D information. Four others tell threads apart: base0E, base0C, base09 and base0F. Status text has to stay readable on the page and card backgrounds (base00 and base01), and on a light wash of its own color, the way badges and hover states draw it. A status slot that falls short is drawn darker or lighter than the hex you entered, as far as it takes to pass, which can be a noticeable shift for a pale or mid-tone color. Links (base0D) shift the same way to stay readable on the page, cards, menus and callouts, and unresolved links (base08) and code block title text (base04) shift too. Secondary text (base04) shifts until it reads at 4.5:1 on the page and card backgrounds (base00 and base01), which menus and the sidebar share. In the command palette and the pickers that share its rows, a highlighted row's secondary text (base04) is also drawn darker or lighter, as far as it takes to read at 4.5:1 on its base02 background, and its label uses whichever of base00, base05 and base07 reads best there, or black or white if none reaches 4.5:1. Deleted text in diffs (base08) shifts until it reads at 4.5:1 on the red wash behind it, and the comment highlight (base0D) until its resting underline reaches 3:1 against the page. The file tree's carets, guides and Markdown icons use base03, shifted as far as it takes to stay visible on the sidebar (base01). The graph colors its clusters with all eight accent slots, base08 through base0F, and skill preview cards draw their tints from six of them. On the graph, an accent, or base04 for default nodes and edges, that reads under 3:1 on the page background (base00) is drawn closer to the text color (base05) until it passes, so it can look darker or lighter than the hex you entered.

Find highlights shift the other way: base0A for every match, and base0D for the editor's current match, move toward the page's end of the scale, darker on a dark page and lighter on a light one, until base05 text reads at 4.5:1 through them. That can leave them close to the page color. In Solarized the editor's and the viewer's find highlights are faint, and the editor's current match shows mostly by its outline; in Catppuccin Frappé, Catppuccin Latte and Gruvbox the viewer's highlights are fainter than the Default theme's.

Copy as YAML exports the scheme in the standard layout, so a theme you tuned here is pasteable anywhere else in the base16 ecosystem.

Theme files

Saved themes are plain Tinted Theming YAML files in ~/.ok/themes/ (~/.ok-beta/themes/ in OpenKnowledge Beta), one file per theme, filename as identity. Drop a downloaded scheme file there (.yaml or .yml only) and it appears in the gallery, since the folder is re-scanned when the Themes page opens. A file that doesn't parse is listed with the reason rather than silently dropped, so it can always be fixed.

Deleting a theme from its tile deletes the file, with an undo window before it's gone for good.

Turn it off

Themes ships enabled. Switch it off in Settings → User ▸ Plugins: the palette drops back to the default stylesheet and the page leaves the sidebar. Your selections stay in config, so switching it back on restores them.