Themes and Appearance
Slate ships with three color modes and four typography themes, and remembers your choice across sessions.
Light, dark, system
Slate ships with three color modes. Choose the one that fits your room.
System mode listens for OS appearance changes. If your operating system switches dark mode on at sunset, Slate follows along the moment the change fires, without a reload.
Typography themes
Slate has four typography themes that shape the rendered preview. They combine two font families with two palettes: a high-contrast palette for editing, and a softer reader palette for long-form reading.
The sans theme uses Inter for prose. The serif theme uses Charter (with Georgia as a fallback). Code is always set in JetBrains Mono regardless of the theme, because code wants a monospace font.
Where each setting applies
Color mode applies to the whole app and to the rendered preview. Window chrome, menus, the sidebar, and the editor all switch together.
Typography theme applies to the rendered preview, since the plain-text editor wants a monospace font and WYSIWYG needs a clean sans face for editing. The point of typography themes is to make Reading view look like the right kind of document for whatever you are reading in Slate.
- Sans + high contrast for crisp documentation or notes.
- Sans + reader for long-form writing you want to be kind to your eyes.
- Serif + high contrast for editorial pieces that should look book-like.
- Serif + reader for sustained reading sessions.
Code highlighting and Mermaid diagram colors follow the color mode, so they always match the surrounding page regardless of which typography theme you picked.
Choosing in Settings
Open Settings from the gear in the sidebar footer or from the application menu. The Appearance category has color mode at the top and the four typography theme cards underneath. Each card shows a preview of the prose and font in that theme, so you can compare without reading the names.
Pick once and forget. There is no per-document override; the theme is a property of the app, not of a file.
How preferences persist
Slate stores your color mode and typography theme in local app storage on your machine. The choice survives quitting and relaunching, and is per installation: signing in to Slate is not a thing, so your settings do not travel with you between computers automatically.