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Theming Element

Themes are a very basic way of providing simple alternative look & feels to the Element app via CSS & custom imagery.

They are NOT co be confused with 'skins', which describe apps which sit on top of matrix-react-sdk - e.g. in theory Element itself is a react-sdk skin. As of March 2022, skins are not fully supported; Element is the only available skin.

To define a theme for Element:

  1. Pick a name, e.g. teal. at time of writing we have light and dark.
  2. Fork src/skins/vector/css/themes/dark.pcss to be teal.pcss
  3. Fork src/skins/vector/css/themes/_base.pcss to be _teal.pcss
  4. Override variables in _teal.pcss as desired. You may wish to delete ones which don't differ from _base.pcss, to make it clear which are being overridden. If every single colour is being changed (as per _dark.pcss) then you might as well keep them all.
  5. Add the theme to the list of entrypoints in webpack.config.js
  6. Add the theme to the list of themes in matrix-react-sdk's UserSettings.js
  7. Sit back and admire your handywork.

In future, the assets for a theme will probably be gathered together into a single directory tree.

Custom Themes

Themes derived from the built in themes may also be defined in settings.

To avoid name collisions, the internal name of a theme is custom-${theme.name}. So if you want to set the custom theme below as the default theme, you would use default_theme: "custom-Electric Blue".

e.g. in config.json:

"setting_defaults": {
        "custom_themes": [
            {
                "name": "Electric Blue",
                "is_dark": false,
                "fonts": {
                    "faces": [
                        {
                            "font-family": "Inter",
                            "src": [{"url": "/fonts/Inter.ttf", "format": "ttf"}]
                        }
                    ],
                    "general": "Inter, sans",
                    "monospace": "'Courier New'"
                },
                "colors": {
                    "accent-color": "#3596fc",
                    "primary-color": "#368bd6",
                    "warning-color": "#ff4b55",
                    "sidebar-color": "#27303a",
                    "roomlist-background-color": "#f3f8fd",
                    "roomlist-text-color": "#2e2f32",
                    "roomlist-text-secondary-color": "#61708b",
                    "roomlist-highlights-color": "#ffffff",
                    "roomlist-separator-color": "#e3e8f0",
                    "timeline-background-color": "#ffffff",
                    "timeline-text-color": "#2e2f32",
                    "timeline-text-secondary-color": "#61708b",
                    "timeline-highlights-color": "#f3f8fd",
                },
                "compound": {
                    "--cpd-color-icon-accent-tertiary": "var(--cpd-color-blue-800)",
                    "--cpd-color-text-action-accent": "var(--cpd-color-blue-900)"
                }
            }, {
                "name": "Deep Purple",
                "is_dark": true,
                "colors": {
                    "accent-color": "#6503b3",
                    "primary-color": "#368bd6",
                    "warning-color": "#b30356",
                    "sidebar-color": "#15171B",
                    "roomlist-background-color": "#22262E",
                    "roomlist-text-color": "#A1B2D1",
                    "roomlist-text-secondary-color": "#EDF3FF",
                    "roomlist-highlights-color": "#343A46",
                    "roomlist-separator-color": "#a1b2d1",
                    "timeline-background-color": "#181b21",
                    "timeline-text-color": "#EDF3FF",
                    "timeline-text-secondary-color": "#A1B2D1",
                    "timeline-highlights-color": "#22262E"
                }
            }
        ]
    }

compound may contain overrides for any semantic design token belonging to our design system. The above example shows how you might change the accent color to blue by setting the relevant semantic tokens to refer to blue base tokens.

All properties in fonts are optional, and will default to the standard Riot fonts.