Dashboard themes

The dashboard ships twelve themes and takes as many of your own as you care to write. A theme is independent of light/dark: you pick the mode in the icon rail, and the theme in System → lerd → Theme.

The theme is stored in ~/.config/lerd/config.yaml under ui.theme, so every device that opens the dashboard shows the same lerd, a phone on the LAN included. Switching it on one device repaints the others straight away, over the socket they already hold open, with no reload. The light/dark mode stays per browser, since that follows the room you are sitting in rather than the install.

Built-in themes

Theme	Accent	Background (dark mode)
lerd	the bright brand red	#0d0d0d
muted	a desaturated brick	#111113
Ocean	a calm steel blue	#0d1418
Solarized Dark	Solarized blue	#002b36
Monokai	Monokai pink	#272822
Cobalt	Cobalt orange	#193549
Dracula	Dracula purple	#282a36
Nord	Nord frost	#2e3440
Gruvbox Dark	Gruvbox orange	#282828
Breeze	Plasma blue	#141618
Adwaita	Adwaita blue	#1d1d20
macOS	the system blue	#1e1e1e

lerd is the default. muted is there for anyone who finds the default red too sharp, especially on a bright screen.

The desktop themes are taken from what those desktops ship today, not from the values most write-ups still quote: Breeze from Plasma 6.7's BreezeDark.colors, Adwaita from libadwaita 1.9's named colours, macOS from Apple's documented system blue and window background. All three have been darkened over the years.

Each theme carries a light tone and a dark tone for its accent, so switching between light and dark keeps the colour readable on whichever surface the mode paints. The editor and desktop schemes are dark schemes: their backgrounds apply in dark mode, and in light mode you get their accent on the usual white.

Writing your own

Drop a YAML file into ~/.config/lerd/themes/. The file name is the theme's id, so lagoon.yaml becomes the theme lagoon. Only name and accent are required; every other tone is derived from the accent, and the surfaces fall back to the built-in ones.

name: Lagoon
accent: "#3b7ea1"

The full set of fields:

name: Lagoon                # what the picker shows
accent: "#3b7ea1"           # buttons, active tabs, links, focus rings (light mode)
accent_hover: "#336b8a"     # the accent's hover tone (light mode)
accent_dark: "#7fb6d4"      # the accent in dark mode
accent_hover_dark: "#93c2dc"# its hover tone in dark mode
bg: "#0c1114"               # page background, dark mode
card: "#141b1f"             # card background, dark mode
border: "#222c32"           # card and divider borders, dark mode
muted: "#3c4a52"            # dim text and inactive marks, dark mode

Every value must be a plain hex colour, #rgb or #rrggbb. CSS colour names (rebeccapurple) and functional notations (rgb(), oklch()) are refused: the value is handed to the browser as a custom property, and only a literal colour may come out of a file and decide how the page paints. The four surface fields apply to dark mode only, where light mode draws on white and the standard greys.

A file named after a built-in replaces it rather than appearing twice, so you can keep the name and change the colours.

Reload the dashboard and the theme appears in the picker. A file with a mistake in it is listed under the picker with the reason, rather than quietly missing.

Importing

System → lerd → Import theme takes a file or pasted YAML and writes it into ~/.config/lerd/themes/ for you, then selects it. The trash icon beside a theme asks before it deletes the file.

Installed as an app

Installed from the browser, the window and the launch splash are painted by the browser rather than by the page. The title bar tint follows the theme as soon as you switch, and the manifest carries the current tones so the app you install matches what you were looking at. The splash is read once at install, so a theme switch afterwards reaches it only when the browser next refreshes the manifest.

Asking an assistant for one

There is no MCP tool for this, deliberately: a theme is a personal choice, and nothing should be able to repaint your dashboard without you. The file is the interface instead. An assistant with access to your files can write a theme into ~/.config/lerd/themes/ the same way it writes any other file, when you ask it to and not otherwise. Point it at the schema above and reload the dashboard.