Themes

Overview

Posting ships with several built-in themes, and also supports custom, user-made themes.

When editing a theme on disk, Posting can show a live preview of the theme in effect, making it easy to design and test themes.

Creating a theme

You can check where Posting will look for themes by running posting locate themes in your terminal. Place custom themes in this directory and Posting will load them on startup. Theme files must be suffixed with .yaml, but the rest of the filename is unused by Posting.

Here's an example theme file:

name: example  # use this name in your config file
primary: '#4e78c4'  # buttons, fixed table columns
secondary: '#f39c12'  # method selector, some minor labels
accent: '#e74c3c'  # header text, scrollbars, cursors, focus highlights
background: '#0e1726' # background colors
surface: '#17202a'  # panels, etc
error: '#e74c3c'  # error messages
success: '#2ecc71'  # success messages
warning: '#f1c40f'  # warning messages

# Optional metadata
author: Darren Burns
description: A dark theme with a blue primary color.
homepage: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting

After adding a theme, you'll need to restart Posting for it to take effect.

To use the theme, you can specify it in your config.yaml file:

theme: example

Note that the theme name is not defined by the filename, but by the name field in the theme file.

Tip

If you edit a theme on disk while Posting is using it, the UI will automatically refresh to reflect the changes you've made. This is enabled by default, but if you'd like to disable it, you can set watch_themes to false in your config.yaml.

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighted elements such as the URL bar, text areas, and fields which contain variables will be colored based on the semantic colors defined in the theme (primary, secondary, etc) by default.

If you'd like more control over the syntax highlighting, you can specify a custom syntax highlighting colors inside the theme file.

The example below illustrates some of the options available when it comes to customizing syntax highlighting.

text_area:
  cursor: 'reverse'  # style the block cursor
  cursor_line: 'underline'  # style the line the cursor is on
  selection: 'reverse'  # style the selected text
  gutter: 'bold #50e3c2'  # style the gutter
  matched_bracket: 'black on green'  # style the matched bracket
url:
  base: 'italic #50e3c2'  # style the 'base' of the url
  protocol: 'bold #b8e986'  # style the protocol
syntax:
  json_key: 'italic #4a90e2'  # style json keys
  json_number: '#50e3c2'  # style json numbers
  json_string: '#b8e986'  # style json strings
  json_boolean: '#b8e986'  # style json booleans
  json_null: 'underline #b8e986'  # style json null values

Method styles

You can also specify custom styles for methods in the collection tree.

Here's an example:

method:
  get: 'underline #50e3c2'
  post: 'italic #b8e986'
  put: 'bold #b8e986'
  delete: 'strikethrough #b8e986'

X resources themes

Posting supports using X resources for theming. To use this, enable the use_xresources option (see above).

It requires the xrdb executable on your PATH and xrdb -query must return the following variables:

Xresources	Description
*color0	primary color: used for button backgrounds and fixed table columns
*color8	secondary color: used in method selector and some minor labels
*color1	error color: used for error messages
*color2	success color: used for success messages
*color3	warning color: used for warning messages
*color4	accent color: used for header text, scrollbars, cursors, focus highlights
*background	background color
*color7	surface/panel color

If these conditions are met, themes called xresources-dark and xresources-light will be available for use.