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Themes

Nexus is fully themeable. Pick one of the built-in themes, tweak colors with color pickers, export your theme to share with friends — no editing files, no CSS skills required.

Pick a built-in theme

  1. Open Settings → Themes.
  2. Every theme (built-in and custom) is in the list.
  3. Click a theme to apply it instantly.

Nexus ships with Nexus Dark (default, cool blue-violet palette) and Nexus Light (bright alternative). Built-ins can't be overwritten — when you edit one, Nexus automatically makes you a copy to work on.

Customize a theme

  1. In Settings → Themes, click the theme you want to base your custom theme on.
  2. Click Edit (or Duplicate if you want to keep the original untouched).
  3. Each color in the palette has a color picker. Click a swatch and drag the picker around — the whole app recolors live as you go.
  4. Change the name at the top if you like.
  5. Click Save.

Your custom theme stays in the list and syncs with whatever profile you're using.

What each color controls

Color Where it shows up
Background The blank canvas behind everything.
Sidebar The module list on the left.
Sidebar hover The highlight you see when you mouse over sidebar items.
Accent Active instance highlight, buttons you can click, focus rings.
Accent foreground Text that sits on top of an accent color (needs to stay readable).
Text Primary text — headings, labels, values.
Muted text Secondary text — subtitles, hints, disabled labels.
Border Lines between sections (sidebar edge, card outlines, modal edges).
Badge Unread-count bubbles and other alert-y accents.
Badge foreground Numbers inside badges.

Tip: contrast

Pick colors that stay readable. A good rule of thumb: the accent and text colors should be dramatically lighter or darker than background and sidebar, and muted text should sit somewhere in between. The editor shows everything live — if it looks wrong, it is wrong.

Share a theme

  • Settings → Themes → Export… bundles any combination of your themes into a single file (.nxthemes). Send that file to a friend.
  • Settings → Themes → Import… installs a theme pack someone has sent you. All of its themes show up in your list instantly.

Theme packs can optionally carry a name and author ("Michael's Pastels by Michael Silverstein") that Nexus shows on import.

Advanced: editing the JSON directly

Themes are just JSON. You don't need to touch these files unless you want to — the in-app editor does everything they do — but it's here if you prefer a text editor or version-controlled dotfiles.

Theme files live at:

OS Path
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Nexus/nexus-themes.json
Windows %APPDATA%\Nexus\nexus-themes.json
Linux ~/.config/Nexus/nexus-themes.json

The file is a JSON array of theme objects. Each theme looks like this:

{
  "id": "my-theme",
  "name": "My Theme",
  "colors": {
    "bg":           "#1a1b26",
    "sidebar":      "#16161e",
    "sidebarHover": "#24263a",
    "accent":       "#7aa2f7",
    "accentFg":     "#0b0c10",
    "text":         "#c0caf5",
    "textMuted":    "#7982a9",
    "border":       "#2a2b3d",
    "badge":        "#f7768e",
    "badgeFg":      "#ffffff"
  }
}

Rules

  • id must be unique and lowercase (a–z, 0–9, -, _).
  • Every color must be a hex value (#rgb, #rrggbb, or #rrggbbaa).
  • Nexus validates the file on startup and falls back to the built-in dark theme if anything's invalid.

What themes can't change

Themes only style Nexus's own shell — the sidebar, settings panels, badges, and so on. They can't restyle the embedded services themselves, because those are the real WhatsApp / Telegram / Teams web apps and Nexus stays out of their way.

If you want to restyle a specific service (for example, hide a banner inside WhatsApp), that's a module-level CSS injection — see the Modules guide.