Themes

Fern ships with many built-in themes with a growing collection of user-contributed themes.

Switching themes

From the command palette (ctrl+p), search for "theme" and select Themes: Change active Theme.

The active theme is saved in your vault's .fern/config.toml automatically.

Built-in themes

Name	Description
`dark`	Default dark theme
`light`	Default light theme

Included themes

All themes listed below are embedded in the Fern binary, so every installation has access to them without any extra setup.

If you place a theme file with the same name in your config themes directory (~/.config/fern/themes/), it will override the built-in theme of that name. This lets you customise a built-in theme without losing the others.

General

Name	Style
`catppuccin-latte`	Catppuccin Latte (light)
`catppuccin-mocha`	Catppuccin Mocha (dark)
`dracula`	Dracula (dark)
`github-light`	GitHub Light
`gruvbox-dark`	Gruvbox dark
`gruvbox-light`	Gruvbox light
`nord`	Nord (cool blues)
`one-light`	Atom One Light
`solarized-light`	Solarized Light
`tokyo-night`	Tokyo Night

Pride flag themes

Name	Flag
`ace`	Asexual pride
`aro`	Aromantic pride
`aroace`	Aromantic-asexual pride
`disability`	Disability pride
`genderfluid`	Genderfluid pride
`intersex`	Intersex pride
`nonbinary`	Non-binary pride
`pan`	Pansexual pride
`polysexual`	Polysexual pride
`progress`	Progress pride
`queer`	Queer pride
`rainbow`	Rainbow pride
`sapphic`	Sapphic pride
`transgender`	Transgender pride
`xenogender`	Xenogender pride

Creating a custom theme

Custom themes are JSON files placed in ~/.config/fern/themes/. The file name (without .json) becomes the theme name.

A theme file can set colors for individual markdown elements and optionally declare a base of "light" or "dark" to inherit defaults from.

Minimal example (~/.config/fern/themes/my-theme.json):

{
  "base": "dark",
  "markdown": {
    "h1": { "color": "205" },
    "h2": { "color": "170" },
    "h3": { "color": "135" },
    "link": { "color": "81" },
    "code_block": { "theme": "dracula" }
  }
}

Colors are specified as ANSI 256-color codes (strings "0"-"255") or as hex color codes (e.g. "#ff79c6"). The code_block.theme value is a Chroma syntax-highlight theme name.

Markdown element keys

Key	What it styles
`h1` through `h6`	Individual heading levels
`heading`	All headings (overridden by `h1`-`h6` if set)
`text`	Body text
`link`	Hyperlinks and wikilinks
`item`	List items
`code_block`	Fenced code blocks (also accepts `theme` for syntax highlighting)

Contributing a theme

If you have made a theme that you want to share with everyone, submit it as a pull request to the Fern repository.