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.

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.

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/, 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.