The Theme tab
Repaint the IDE while you use it — the Theme tab's seven pages, the draft bar that holds your changes, and the one rule about what sticks.
Most editors let you pick a theme from a list. Semantix lets you pick one and then change any part of it — colours, fonts, glass, wallpaper, even a stylesheet per region — and watch the whole IDE repaint as you do.
Opening it#
The Theme button in the menu bar — the palette, just left of Settings. It opens as a tab,
like Settings, on the same shape: a rail of pages down the left, the page on the right, and both
side panels slide away while it's in front.
Seven pages:
| Page | What's on it |
|---|---|
| Presets | The gallery of themes, the Dark/Light switch, Reset, and the export/import/share icons |
| Colours | The nine named colours the IDE is painted with, and the file-icon tint |
| Code | The file editor's syntax theme, typeface, size and minimap, and the colours of code outside the editor |
| Typography | The interface and mono fonts, and the two text sizes |
| Glass | Translucency, panel and surface opacity, and the depth shade |
| Wallpaper | A gradient or image behind the whole IDE |
| Section CSS | A stylesheet, or a whole HTML document, per region |
Every control applies live. There is nothing to press to see a change.
→ Colours, code, type and glass · Wallpaper and custom code
What a theme is#
A theme is a complete palette plus everything layered on it: the editor font and syntax theme it declares, its section stylesheets, its part edits, its wallpaper. Four ship with Semantix — Semantix Native (the default), Daylight, Gruvbox Dark and Solarized Light — and your own saved themes sit beside them in the gallery.
Themes are stored per user, not per project, so they follow you into every project on this machine. A few things on these pages are the machine's own preference rather than part of a theme, and the pages say which.
⚑ The draft bar, and the one rule#
Change anything — a colour, a font, a stylesheet, the wallpaper — and a small box appears at the bottom right: Unsaved theme changes. That box is where a draft ends, and it ends one of three ways:
- Discard — drop the changes; the saved theme comes back exactly as it was.
- Update — bake the changes into the theme you're on. Offered only on a theme of your own; built-in themes are never changed in place.
- Save as new… — type a name, press Save, and the whole look becomes a new theme of yours, selected.
The box has no close button, on purpose. The chevron folds it to a small Unsaved pill so you can see what's behind it; the draft stays. And the rule:
Important
Unsaved changes are dropped when the app closes. A draft lives until you Discard, Update or Save as new — and not a second past the next restart. An afternoon of colour-picking that you never saved is gone the next morning. The box says so, every time it appears.
Leaving the Theme tab doesn't touch a draft; switching to another tab, opening a file, running an agent — the draft rides along, pill and all, until you decide.
Important
Picking a different theme also drops the draft. A switch is a clean switch: it paints exactly that theme, and your unsaved colours, stylesheets and part edits go with the one you left. Re-picking the theme you're already on is safe and changes nothing. Save first if you want to keep any of it.
→ Saving, sharing and the share card
The Presets page#
The gallery, each theme drawn as a small mock IDE painted in its own colours. Click one and the whole IDE repaints.
Mode — Dark / Light — says which kind of theme the gallery is showing, and switching it
picks the first theme of the other kind. Your own saved themes are only listed when the mode matches
theirs.
Under the gallery, the active theme's name, marked built-in or not, with an unsaved dot when there's a draft, and a Delete this theme bin on your own themes. Deleting the one you're wearing drops you back to Semantix Native. No confirmation.
Reset the look — Reset all — drops every edit down to the bare token floor: colours, fonts, surface styles, animations and wallpaper. It is itself an unsaved change, so the draft bar appears and you can Update a theme with the cleared state, or Discard and have the theme's own look back. Pick the theme again in the gallery to bring its baked look back.
The three icons on the page's title line — Export, Share card, Import — are covered on the saving page.
The rest of these pages#
- Colours, code, type and glass — the four pages of knobs.
- Wallpaper and custom code — what shows through the glass, and a stylesheet or a live HTML document per region.
- Saving, sharing and the share card — the draft bar in full, moving a theme between machines, and the poster it can draw of itself.