Themes

Zed comes with a number of built-in themes, with more themes available as extensions.

Selecting a Theme

See what themes are installed and preview them via the Theme Selector, which you can open from the command palette with "theme selector: Toggle" (bound to cmd-k cmd-t on macOS and ctrl-k ctrl-t on Linux).

Navigating through the theme list by moving up and down will change the theme in real time and hitting enter will save it to your settings file.

Installing more Themes

More themes are available from the Extensions page, which you can access via the command palette with "zed: Extensions" or the Zed website.

Many popular themes have been ported to Zed, and if you're struggling to choose one, visit zed-themes.com, a third-party gallery with visible previews for many of them.

Configuring a Theme

Your selected theme is stored in your settings file. You can open your settings file from the command palette with "zed: Open Settings" (bound to cmd-, on macOS and ctrl-, on Linux).

By default, Zed maintains two themes: one for light mode and one for dark mode. You can set the mode to "dark" or "light" to ignore the current system mode.

{
  "theme": {
    "mode": "system",
    "light": "One Light",
    "dark": "One Dark"
  }
}

Theme Overrides

To override specific attributes of a theme, use the experimental.theme_overrides setting.

For example, to override the background color of the editor and the font style of comments, add the following to your settings.json file:

{
  "experimental.theme_overrides": {
    "editor.background": "#333",
    "syntax": {
      "comment": {
        "font_style": "italic"
      }
    }
  }
}

See which attributes are available to override by looking at the JSON format of your theme. For example, here is the JSON format for the One themes.

Local Themes

Store new themes locally by placing them in the ~/.config/zed/themes directory.

For example, to create a new theme called my-cool-theme, create a file called my-cool-theme.json in that directory. It will be available in the theme selector the next time Zed loads.

Find more themes at zed-themes.com.

Theme Development

See: Developing Zed Themes