ThinkForge themes control every surface color, font, and spacing value in the application. Switching a theme updates the whole interface immediately — there is no save step and no restart.
Presets, Not Skins
A ThinkForge theme is a preset. It defines four global colors — primary, background, text, and border — plus typography, spacing, and up to 66 per-element color overrides for surfaces such as cards, panels, buttons, inputs, tabs, sidebars, toolbars, and dialogs.
ThinkForge ships with 13 built-in presets spanning light, medium, and dark backgrounds. These share a color language with the ThinkForge Chat Chrome extension. You can also create, edit, import, and export your own presets through the Theme Editor.
Built-in presets
Light group — Light Cool, Light Paper, Cloud Dancer, Light Hero
Medium group — Mocha Mist, Jade Clean, Wasabi Pop
Dark group — Graphite, True Dark, Nord, Espresso, Dark Hero, Studio Graphite
The default preset is Graphite.
Choosing a Theme
Open Settings, then Appearance. Every available theme is drawn as a card showing a background preview, an accent bar, four color swatches, and the theme name. Built-in presets appear first. A Custom Themes header and second row appear once you have at least one custom theme.
Clicking a card applies that theme immediately. The active theme's card is drawn with an accent border and a semibold name.
Open Theme Editor opens the editor for building or cloning a theme. Built-in presets are read-only and must be cloned before editing. See Creating Themes.
Light and Dark Switching
ThinkForge decides whether the application runs in Light or Dark mode from the theme's background color brightness. A light background switches the app to Light mode; a dark one switches it to Dark.
This automatic switch is what keeps tooltips, menus, context menus, and other system popups readable. Those surfaces follow the light or dark mode rather than the theme's own text color.
The result: pick a theme with a light background and the whole interface — including popups — reads as a light theme, with no separate mode setting to keep in sync.
Main-Window Tab Accents
Main-window tabs use your theme for their backgrounds and text. A thin accent line identifies the kind of surface: Project Navigator is blue, Tools is purple, documents are cyan, Mind Map is green, Automations and work-management views are orange, Projects is yellow, and Settings is red. The selected tab adds a restrained glow.
Where Themes Are Stored
Themes are JSON files under your ThinkForge data root:
Themes\built-in\— the shipped presets, written on first launch. Read-only.Themes\custom\— your own and imported themes.
In a release build the data root is Documents\Think Forge.
Because themes are plain files, they can be copied between machines. The Theme Editor also has explicit import and export.
Chrome Extension Themes Are Separate
The Chrome extension has its own theme system. The desktop presets and the extension palettes were designed together, but the two do not share state at runtime. Changing a preset in the desktop app does not change the extension, and vice versa. Set the extension's theme under its Settings > Appearance.
Editor Theming
Document colors — body text, headings, links, code block backgrounds, blockquote borders, and horizontal rules — are part of the theme.
Known limitation: the rich text editor currently uses fixed fallback colors for these rather than following the active preset. Full theme sync inside the editor is a planned improvement.