Themes and appearance

Tau ships eleven built-in themes and lets you build your own. A theme is personal: it does not change what anyone else sees.

Open the theme picker

In Settings → Appearance, the Theme grid shows every built-in theme plus any themes you have saved, with High contrast always last. Hover a theme to preview it across the app; move away and your applied theme returns. Select one to apply it immediately.

On a wider screen, the palette button in the header opens a compact version of the same picker without leaving the page. Hover a swatch to preview it across the app; move away and your applied theme returns. Select a swatch to apply it. The header picker is not shown on narrow/mobile widths — use Settings there instead.

Choose a built-in theme

Theme	Character	Appearance
Tau	The default: balanced blue-gray with a calm accent.	Light / Dark / System
Harbor	Cool slate surfaces with a restrained teal accent.	Light / Dark / System
Forest	Pine green with warm bark and mossy accents.	Light / Dark / System
Ember	Warm paper and charcoal with a terracotta accent.	Light / Dark / System
High contrast	Stark black-on-white with strong outlines.	Fixed
nurebairo	Deep charcoal with a rose-pink accent.	Fixed
Phosphorus	Soft sage green with a violet accent.	Fixed
yamabukiiro	Golden amber with a deep plum accent.	Fixed
moegiiro	Vivid forest green with a bright yellow accent.	Fixed
adzukiiro	Deep maroon with a cool blue-gray accent.	Fixed
asagiiro	Steel blue with a golden accent.	Fixed

Tau, Harbor, Forest and Ember each have a light and a dark side, so they follow your Light/Dark/System choice below. High contrast and the six palette themes (nurebairo, Phosphorus, yamabukiiro, moegiiro, adzukiiro, asagiiro) have one fixed appearance each, so the appearance control is hidden while one of them is active. Your choice is kept: previewing or switching back to a light/dark theme uses it.

Set light, dark, or system appearance

Use the Light / Dark / System control next to the theme grid (or in the header picker) to choose how a light/dark theme renders. System follows your operating system’s setting. Your appearance choice is kept when you switch between themes that support it.

Build your own theme

Under My themes, select New theme to open the theme editor. It starts from the theme you’re using; Based on, next to the name, changes it. The base supplies every color your theme doesn’t set, and decides whether it has light and dark versions.

The editor is palette-first — set a few seed colors and most of the theme derives automatically:

Primary — your theme’s main accent color.
Secondary — tints hover, selected and pill backgrounds. Setting Primary fills it with a matching color (the analogous hue) until you change it.
Tertiary — highlights like the logo tile. Setting Primary fills it with a contrasting color (the split-complementary hue) until you change it.
Neutral (optional) — tints the backgrounds, borders, and surfaces.
Contrast: Standard / High — how strongly text needs to stand out from its background.
Status colors: Static / Harmonized — Static keeps success/warning/danger colors as they are; Harmonized tints them toward your palette while keeping their meaning.

A theme covers both light and dark at once — edit each side from the Light/Dark tabs (a theme based on a fixed-appearance built-in has just one). Everything you change previews live across the whole app, not a small sample, so you can see exactly how it will look while you work.

Nothing is saved until you choose to save it:

Save — updates the theme you’re editing.
Save as new — saves your changes as a separate theme instead, leaving the original untouched.
Cancel — discards your changes and restores the theme you had applied before.

For finer control, expand Advanced: per-token overrides to set individual colors beyond what the palette covers. If a color pair doesn’t meet a readable contrast level, the editor flags it with a warning and offers Use safe value to correct it automatically. Warnings don’t block saving.

Ask the assistant to adjust a theme

When you have chat access, opening or editing a theme also opens a theme assistant beside the editor. Describe what you want in plain language:

Make it warmer, with a teal accent.

Give it higher contrast.

The assistant edits your draft directly and previews live, the same as a manual change — nothing saves until you choose Save or Save as new. Manual edits and the assistant’s edits share one Undo/Redo history. If your instance has Realtime voice set up, you can talk to the assistant instead of typing, the same as the workspace Assistant.

Manage your saved themes

Each saved theme in My themes offers Use (apply it), Edit, Rename, Duplicate, Export (download it as JSON), and Delete (with confirmation). Import JSON… adds a theme file someone shared with you into your own library. You can save up to 50 themes.

Choose Share on one of your saved themes to make it visible to everyone else on your Tau instance; Unshare takes it back to private. Shared themes from other people appear under Shared themes, each labeled with its name and who shared it.

Use links to the live theme — if its author edits it later, you see the update automatically.
Duplicate makes your own independent copy that no longer changes with the original.

If a theme you’re using gets unshared or deleted, you keep the last version you saw, and Settings shows a notice with a Keep a copy action to save it into your own library. Admins and operators with the right permission can remove a theme from the shared list; it stays in its owner’s own library, just no longer shared.

Keep your theme synced across devices

Signed in, your theme and appearance choice sync automatically to every device you use. Changing the theme on one device updates the others the next time they check in. To give devices different looks, choose System appearance: each device then follows its own light or dark setting.