Themes and styles

A theme sets the colors of the editor and the whole window: tabs, panels, menus and dialogs. Choose one in Settings → Theme; appearance.theme sets the theme at startup.

Built-in and Notepad++ themes

Default: Notepad++’s default colors.
Dark: dark text and interface.

Notepad++ XML themes work as they are: put the file in the themes folder next to the settings, or use Settings → Import → Import Style Themes…. Scintilla style colors are matched to Birchpad’s highlighting by their names. Fonts are not taken from themes yet.

Style Configurator

Settings → Style Configurator… works as in Notepad++: choose a theme and change its colors (the editor’s global styles, the interface, and highlighting for all languages or one: color, background, bold, italic, underline). Changes show at once. Save & Close writes the theme to themes/<name>.toml; the built-in files stay untouched.

Theme file format

A theme is a TOML file in the themes folder. It only needs what it changes: the other colors come from the built-in theme of the same brightness. A theme is dark when it says dark = true or its editor background is dark.

dark = true

[editor]
background = "#002b36"
text = "#839496"
selection = "#073642"
caret = "#93a1a1"

[ui]
accent = "#268bd2"

[syntax]
comment = { color = "#586e75", italic = true }
keyword = "#859900"
string = "#2aa198"
"function.method" = "#268bd2"

[language.python]
keyword = { color = "#cb4b16", bold = true }

A color is #rrggbb or #rrggbbaa (with transparency). A style is a color string or a table with color, background, bold, italic, underline.

`[editor]`

text, background, selection, caret, current-line, gutter-background, gutter-text, gutter-border, bookmark, change-modified, change-saved, fold-mark, fold-line, fold-underline, whitespace, eol-box, eol-text, indent-guide, edge, brace-match, brace-bad, smart-highlight, find-mark, incremental-highlight, mark-1 … mark-5 (the five token styles), scrollbar-thumb.

`[ui]`

background, surface, border, text, muted, faint, selected, hovered, accent, error, error-background, modified, directory, heading, line-number, match-background.

`[syntax]`

Styles by highlight name: attribute, boolean, character, comment, constant, constant.builtin, constructor, escape, function, function.macro, keyword, keyword.directive, label, module, number, operator, property, string, string.escape, string.regexp, string.special.key, tag, tag.attribute, type, variable.builtin, markup.heading, markup.italic, markup.strong, markup.link, markup.list, markup.quote, markup.raw, diff.plus, diff.minus, diff.delta, error.

A dotted name without a style of its own takes its prefix’s: function.method → function. A style the file sets replaces the base theme’s more specific ones (string replaces string.escape too), so your color is not hidden by styles the file does not know about.

`[language.<id>]`

Styles of one language that differ from the shared ones. Ids are listed in Languages.

The complete built-in themes, with comments, are a good start: default.toml and dark.toml.