Aug 27

Allow override/merging of specific properties in a theme

Use e.g. `theme-local.json` to override/merge specific settings in a theme, using regular CSS overriding rules. This would allow a much shorter version of e.g. [this Orange Squash theme](https://gist.github.com/tastapod/f472da992b44ab736068bc9ceac…) that just overrides the vertical spacing in a number of places. Advantages over customising a theme: 1. You can switch themes and keep the same modifications (which plays nice with automatic light/dark theme switching). 2. No divergence as a theme changes over time, and no need to keep checking. 3. Easy to see what you are changing/overriding.

Pending

last week

This would be so important for small tweaks. For example, I use a custom theme that basically just detects Jira issue IDs and converts them into a link. These are <5 lines of CSS, the rest is copied from the official theme. However, I have to regularly check if the base theme has changed and then merge these changes, and I need to maintain this twice in two separate themes (light and dark). If I ever switch to another theme, I'll have to migrate these changes manually. I think that it'd make sense to simply have a textbox in the settings window for the theme override.

Aug 28, 2021

I like this idea a lot, because now that I have hand-edited a couple of selectors in my theme, I'm reluctant to ever change themes. I'm not sure I'll even remember which ones I edited. For this reason, I still don't have an h4 style, even though some themes now have them. Would be awesome and trivial for Eduard Metzger to just overlay a local file on top of whatever theme you have and overwrite a few selectors. Your secondary market idea is a cool one too -- maybe there's ultimately a theme-override folder and any items in that folder overwrite the selected theme selectors. So I could download one snipped from you, another from Jonathan Clark and another from someone else and save them in a folder.

Aug 28, 2021

Great idea. As prior art on this is close to what Typora does (though that applies per Theme, I think, not globally).

Aug 28, 2021

Jonathan Clark: I didn’t know that about Typora. It also occurs to me that this could create a secondary market in “theme mods”, so you might have a theme mod of “collapse vertical space” (like my one), another for “prefer system fonts”, etc., which you could overlay on your chosen theme :)

Aug 28, 2021

Daniel Terhorst-North: yum yum!