Appearance and themes

Switch between light and dark, pick a theme, or build your own colors and fonts — applied across the whole app.

Kaizendex's colors and fonts are controlled by themes. You choose how the app looks — light or dark, which palette, which fonts — and it applies everywhere: sidebar, cards, buttons, charts.

You'll find it all in Settings → Appearance. On desktop, open Settings from the gear icon next to your name at the bottom of the sidebar; on phone, tap More in the bottom bar and then your name. Then click the Appearance pill at the top of the page.

Light, dark, or system

The mode toggle decides which theme is showing:

System — follows your device's light/dark setting and switches automatically.
Light — always your light theme.
Dark — always your dark theme.

You keep two themes active at once — one for light, one for dark. Mode just picks which slot is on screen. So you can set a warm light theme and a deep dark theme, leave mode on System, and Kaizendex flips between them with your OS.

Picking a theme

Each slot (light and dark) shows every theme you can choose from as a small tile you can actually look at — the theme's own background, its card surface and its buttons, painted in that theme. A name tells you nothing about a colour scheme, so the pictures are on the page rather than hidden inside a dropdown.

Built-in themes ship with the app and are always available.
Your own themes appear alongside them, marked Yours, once you add or create any.

Tap a tile to make it the active light (or dark) theme. A tick appears on it and the whole app re-colors instantly. It works the same way on your phone.

Each tile has a ⋯ menu with everything else you can do to that theme:

Theme	Menu
Built-in	Duplicate — makes an editable copy you own
Yours	Edit, Publish…, Delete

Above the shelves there's a search box (it filters both light and dark at once), plus Browse the Library to copy a theme somebody published and New theme to start from scratch. There is no separate Themes page any more — everything happens right here.

More themes are in the Library

The app ships with a small built-in shelf on purpose. The rest of our themes — Purple Light, Driftwood, Glacier, Cherry Snow, Manuscript, Cozy, Mono, Purple Dark, Deep Pine, Coal Hearth, Neon HUD and Terminal — live in the Kaizendex Library, marked Official, and you add the ones you actually want.

On a theme's Library page you get two things a list of swatches can't give you:

What it looks like — the real type ramp, the real buttons, the three backgrounds, the status colours and every colour role, all drawn in that theme.
Try it on — one tap and the whole app wears the theme so you can walk around in it. Nothing is saved. Tap Stop trying it on (or just leave the page) and your own theme comes straight back; tap Add to my themes and it becomes a theme you own and can edit.

A theme you add is yours — a full copy, not a link to ours. Edit it, rename it, publish your version. Ours changing later does not change yours.

Removing a theme

Any theme you own has a Delete in its ⋯ menu. It goes, and if it was the active light or dark theme the built-in default takes over.

One rule stops you painting yourself into a corner: your library always keeps at least one light theme and one dark theme. The app needs both — mode System shows one of each — so deleting the last theme of a type is refused with a note saying which one and why. Appearance shows your current count under the shelves, and warns you when a type is down to its last one. (Searching never changes that count — hiding a theme can't make another one deletable.)

Pick your own background

Under the theme shelves there's a Background shelf. It sets the picture behind the whole app: choose None, one of the backgrounds on your shelf, or Upload your own.

A new account starts with six backgrounds already on the shelf, so there is something to look at from day one.

This is the app's default background, not a rule. A chat or a dashboard that carries its own picture takes over the window while you're on it, and your default comes back when you leave — see The app background for the whole picture.

Your background is yours, not the theme's, so switching theme keeps it. Turn it off by picking None.

More backgrounds in the Library

Get more backgrounds under the shelf opens the Kaizendex Library showing only Backgrounds. Each one has its own page with a live preview, a Try it on button that dresses the whole app while you decide, and Get this background to keep it.

Getting one is free and instant — it lands on your shelf right away and uses none of your storage, because the picture stays with us rather than being copied into your account. Delete it later and only the shelf tile goes; you can always get it again.

Some official themes bring a background with them, so adding the theme puts its picture on your shelf too.

Animated backgrounds

Some backgrounds move — a slow, silent loop rather than a busy one. The still picture appears immediately and the motion fades in a moment later, so nothing ever waits on it. If your device asks for reduced motion, you get the still picture and nothing moves.

Uploading your own

Upload takes photos, GIFs and looping videos (mp4/webm).

Big photos (over about 1.5 MB) are shrunk automatically. You see the before-and-after size and a Use original link if you'd rather have the untouched file.
GIFs and videos are offered the same treatment — Optimize turns them into a small silent looping video, or Upload as is keeps your file exactly as it is. Nothing happens without your say-so.
Videos longer than 30 seconds can't be optimized; trim it to 30 seconds first, or it goes up as is. A large unoptimized video gets a gentle warning, because it will be slow to load.

Uploading a second picture doesn't replace the first. Every background you upload stays on the shelf, next to the rest, so you can keep a small collection and switch between them whenever you like.

Each one is yours to manage:

Rename it. Hover a background you uploaded and a small pencil appears in its corner. Click it to open the background's own window, type a new name, and the label under the tile changes as you type.
Delete it. The same window has a Delete button. It goes right away, and the rest of your collection is untouched. If you delete the one you're currently wearing, the app quietly goes back to None.

Backgrounds that come with a theme

Some themes bring their own. Aurora Glass (light) and Nocturne Glass (dark) place a soft gradient wallpaper behind the app and turn the sidebar, top bar and panels into frosted, see-through glass. Deck White and Deck Black use the same frame with solid panels instead — plain white, or true black for an OLED screen — if frosted glass isn't for you.

A theme's background is the quietest option of the three: your own pick wins over it, and anything you have open with its own picture wins over both. Pick a theme with no background of its own and set no picture yourself, and the app is a flat colour. Your own themes can carry a background too (see below).

Making your own

Open Settings → Appearance. There are two ways to add a theme: Browse the Library to copy one of our official themes or one somebody published, or New theme to start from scratch. You can also open any built-in's ⋯ menu and hit Duplicate to get an editable copy you own. Either way you land in the theme editor, which is a page of its own — the Appearance pill stays lit, and the back button brings you to the shelf.

In the theme editor you can change:

Colors — each part of the interface (background, surfaces, text, the accent color, borders, and more) is a named slot you can recolor.
Fonts — pick from the bundled font set for the app's body, monospace and display text, and separately for section headings and big numbers. Leave the last two alone and they follow your display font — set them and a dashboard can wear a serif for its titles and a terminal mono for its numerals. Alongside the everyday faces there are five display faces for when a board should have a world of its own: Cinzel Decorative (engraved, fantasy), EB Garamond (classic book serif), Silkscreen (pixel), Caveat (handwritten) and Baloo 2 (soft and rounded). They're bundled in the phone app too, so a themed board reads the same on your phone as in the browser.
Region tweaks — nudge just one area (say, a darker sidebar) without touching the rest.
Icons — swap any of the app's built-in icons for this theme: folders, notes, the property-type icons, and menu icons. Open the Icons panel, search for the one you want to change, and pick an emoji, a built-in icon, or your own image. Leave one alone to keep its default, or hit Remove to reset it. A light theme and a dark theme can each have their own set.
Your colours — name a colour once and use it anywhere by name (see below).
App background & glass — give your theme one of the built-in wallpapers and a glass blur. Turn the blur up and the sidebar, top bar and popovers frost over the wallpaper, the way the two Glass built-ins do. Leave the background on None for the flat look. The same panel holds Panel opacity (how much of the wallpaper shows through your panels) and Toast opacity — the little messages that pop up to confirm something. Toasts are solid unless you say otherwise, so a message is always readable over whatever is behind it; drag Toast opacity down if you want them see-through like the panels.
Completion celebration — whether ticking something off throws confetti while you're wearing this theme (see below).

The editor shows itself in the theme you're editing, so what you see is what the app will look like.

There's also a raw JSON editor (the <> JSON button) for power users and for pasting a theme the AI generated for you. It holds the whole theme — everything the form has, plus a few things it has no picker for — and it works both ways, as you type: edit the JSON and the fields and preview change immediately; change a field and reopen the JSON and it's there. Anything malformed is rejected with a message, and your theme is left as it was until you fix it.

Your own named colours

The six chart colours are worked out from your theme's accent, which keeps a dashboard looking like one thing — but sometimes you want that red, because that's what an HP bar is.

In the theme editor, Your colours lets you name a colour and pick it:

Name	Colour
`hp-red`	#ff2d55
`mana`	#7c5cff

Once a colour has a name, any widget or card can use it just by saying the name where a colour goes — for example "color": "hp-red". Change the colour here later and everything using that name changes with it. Ask the assistant and it can add names for you too — "add a blood-red called hp-red".

You can also write a colour directly, like "#ff2d55", when you just want that exact shade and don't need it to follow the theme. Both work; the difference is only whether it changes when your theme does.

Beyond that, a colour can be one of the six chart slots (chart-1 … chart-6) or one of the app's own roles (role:destructive for the app's red, and so on).

Controls — the shape of your checkbox

Checkboxes are round everywhere in Kaizendex by default. If you prefer square ones, that's a theme setting, not a fixed rule.

Beyond colours and fonts, a theme also sets the app-wide shape of the controls you tap most — starting with the checkbox. Open the theme editor's Controls section and you can change its size, how rounded its corners are, its border thickness, and its box and fill colours, with a live preview as you adjust each one. Corner rounding starts at 9 (half the box, so it looks like a circle) — drop it to 4 for the softly rounded square Kaizendex used before, or 0 for a sharp square. Set it once here and every checkbox across the app — collection rows, checklists, habit calendars — picks it up, unless a specific view has its own Style override for just that view.

A dashboard's own theme

A dashboard can pick one of your saved themes and wear it while that tab is open — its own palette and fonts, separate from your everyday theme — so a violet game-HUD board and a cream planner board can both be right at once. It's set in the dashboard's JSON (Edit dashboard (JSON) → "theme_id"); the rest of the app, including the sidebar and any other open tab, keeps your regular theme.

Completion celebration

Checking something off — a routine item, a todo row, any checkbox — makes the box pop with a small fireworks burst of confetti, in your theme's colors. On your phone you can also swipe a checklist row (or a whole todo card) sideways — either direction — to complete it without aiming for the checkbox.

The theme decides. Confetti is part of a theme's character, the same way its wallpaper is — so a calm theme can stay quiet and a playful one can pop, and you get whichever mood you put on. Open the theme in the editor and use its Completion celebration setting:

Use my app setting — this theme has no opinion, so your usual behaviour carries on. Every theme starts here.
Celebrate — always confetti while you're wearing this theme.
Stay quiet — never confetti while you're wearing this theme.

Built-in themes can't be edited, so duplicate one first if you want to change its answer.

The effect also stays off automatically when your device asks for reduced motion — and your saves are never affected either way.

The app background — one picture behind everything, and which one wins
Customizing the card — per-Collection card colors, fonts, and layout
Chat backgrounds — a background image per conversation
Profile and username — the rest of your account settings