Custom color themes

I love the themes, but none of them hit the spot for me just right. My favorite for now is Ayu but the orange bugs me a bit. It would be nice to be able to choose a basic theme like Ayu and select the accent color from a hex code, slider, etc.

The way Slack handles themes is brilliant—they have presets but also let you customize your own theme by selecting the color for each UI element. This level of customization would be ideal and really make Bear feel like home.

15 Likes

+1 to request Custom color themes

For reference, here’s a beautiful custom theme for the Obsidian notes app:

:bear:

This one has an amazing gradient effect:

This is something I’d be interested as well!
In my case I’d like to have more controls over the color elements and background color of the dark modes specifically to make them more monochrome and less saturated.

I also really want themes. I dislike something about all the bear themes

1 Like

+1 to request colorful headlings.
Thanks!

Yeah +100 for custom themes. The Bear themes are really nice, but most of them a really “wild” for the lack of a better word :blush: I’d love to have something like the default or Dark Notes with a different accent color, something more subdued and simple.

2 Likes

Couldn’t have said it better!
+1

+1 I completely agree!
Especially for changing the different header levels. This would (in my opinion) fix a lot of the confusion in other threads about how the header levels look so similar now.

Thought about themes some more. I think something I always noticed about Android was the heavy use of medium gray themes. I absolutely hate them. It was used throughout so many Android apps, in YouTube dark mode, discord still uses it and so on. Yikes.

Bear is kinda in the old Android days. Dark themes using medium gray. They at least got one completely black theme, but this yellow colour doesn’t look very nice.
I’d actually like the dark gray they use in YouTube right now. Not completely black, but very close.

With light mode, I kinda like when the page (writing area) is white, but everything around it is in a different colour. Kinda like pages (light mode) does it.

Anyways the point I really want to be clear is that everyone got different preferences. Please give us more tools to customise Bear to our liking.

Another option would be to identify Bear-worthy color palettes and submit them to the devs for consideration. That’s what I did.

1 Like

Why should just the devs have fun? Custom themes are by far not essential but a lovely thing for playing around, procrastinating and sharing. Don‘t be a grinch!

in Bear 2.0 we did a big rewrite of our themes to make it easier for us to customize/make new ones.

We have plans to make the themes creation/tweaking available to our users, but it’s going to be after the 2.0 launch :slight_smile:

28 Likes

The ability to adjust/tweak themes can be very helpful for those who are challenged by colour and ease the accessibility onus on the dev team.

1 Like

This is so much appreciated!!
Thank you, Bear team!
Wonderful news!

Definitely looking forward to this!!

1 Like

+1
So far, Ulysses has the best way to style a theme. Not too extreme, has all the features but doesn’t get overwhelming

Ulysses doesn’t have real themes. Rather than that they allow to customize the whole mark up. Furthermore the downoadable themes change the background of the editor. The main ui, f.e. the side panels remain untouched

Very much looking forward to custom theming. I also wanted to suggest looking at how Breveto does it. It’s very well done. Would really like it if Bear implemented it the same or similar way.

4 Likes

I subscribed for one month the app just to see its full feature set. Generally spoken, how they implemented the ui for the creation of own themes is what I also wish for bear: a live preview and a list of elements which color to change.

But there are some weak points which bear devs should address in their implementation:

  • you always start with the same theme. So if you want to tweak an existing theme a little bit, you are out of luck

  • it is not clear by name of Color options which element in the theme is going to be changed

But my main point in regard to brevetos solution:

I think too many Color options are available whereas it would be friendlier that a part of the colours are calculated based upon some basic colours.

1 Like

Your second bullet point is spot on. That was always a little annoying for sure. Also, Linear does something similar to what you’re mentioning about some of the colors being calculated. With Bear though, I’d be perfectly fine with how Breveto does it as I don’t think Bear has an overwhelming amount of colors to tweak. Breveto also made it possible to duplicate any theme and start with the duplicate.