Themes
The dashboard has one design. Themes change its colours and nothing else.
- Open the dashboard. See The dashboard if it isn't set up yet.
- Open Settings: the gear at the foot of the left rail (the strip of tabs) on a laptop, or at the top right on a phone.
- Under Appearance, each choice shows a small preview of the Today tab. Tap Use this on the one you want.
| Appearance | What you see |
|---|---|
| Match device (the default) | Follows your device, light or dark, including when it switches on its own in the evening |
| Light | Always the light screen |
| Dark | Always the dark screen |
The choice is saved in Pepper, not in your browser, so your phone and your laptop share it; with Match device, each one follows its own light or dark setting. On browsers that colour the toolbar to match a page, the toolbar changes with your choice.
A colour theme is the set of six colours the dashboard draws with. Pepper comes with one, warm silver and ink. When more themes are installed, Settings lists them under Colour theme, each with a light preview, and a dark one if it has a dark palette. Your appearance choice applies to whichever you pick; a theme with no dark palette looks the same whichever appearance you choose.
A theme never changes:
- which tabs there are, or what is on them;
- the order of items, or which item Today asks you to start with;
- the buttons, the keyboard shortcuts, or Undo;
- the fonts, the pixel icons, or how the dashboard is laid out on a phone or a laptop.
Every theme has to keep text readable, and red has to keep its meaning in every theme: overdue, urgent, warnings and the chili.
A theme is one small JSON file, a text file naming six colours. Drop a valid one in Pepper's themes/ folder
and restart, and it's in Settings. To make one, with or without an AI assistant, see
Dashboard themes.
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