fman

Themes

Switch between eleven bundled color themes, or write your own in one small JSON file.

In this section

Window opacity

Make the fman window see-through, at a level that survives theme switches.

Select theme

Switch fman's colors from the command palette, applied immediately and remembered.

fman ships eleven color themes and can load your own. Switching applies immediately and is remembered across restarts.

Switching theme

  1. Press Ctrl+Shift+P and run Select theme.
  2. The list shows every installed theme, the active one preselected and marked current. Type to fuzzy-filter, like any palette list.
  3. Pick one. The panes, header, status bar, location bar, dialogs and the palette itself recolor right away.

Bundled: Monokai (the default, fman's classic look), Dark, Light, Solarized Dark, Solarized Light, Nord, Dracula, Gruvbox Dark, High Contrast, WezTerm, Matrix.

Change theme, color scheme, colors, dark mode and skin find the command in the palette too. It has no default key binding; bind one like any other command:

{ "keys": ["Ctrl+Alt+T"], "command": "select_theme" }

Two things do not recolor live:

  • A file viewer that is already open (text, image or video). Those take their colors from the pane when they open — close and reopen the file.
  • Context menus on Windows and macOS. They imitate the native OS menu on purpose and stay light under every theme.

Writing your own theme

A theme is one JSON file listing only the colors it changes:

{
	"colors": {
		"pane_bg": "#2e3440",
		"pane_fg": "#d8dee9",
		"pane_selected_fg": "#88c0d0"
	}
}
  • The file name is the theme name. Nord.json shows up as Nord.
  • Put it in %APPDATA%/fman/Themes/ on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/fman/Themes on macOS, or ~/.config/fman/Themes on Linux. A file there shadows a bundled theme of the same name.
  • Unknown color names and invalid values are ignored, not fatal — a typo costs you that one color, it never stops fman from starting.
  • Values are any color Qt understands: #rgb, #rrggbb, white. A value containing ;, { or } is rejected.

You only need the 15 core colors

Colors you leave out inherit from a parent before falling back to the default. Setting pane_bg alone also moves base_bg (what the text viewer paints on), and setting border alone moves every separator and bevel in the quicksearch popup.

Name What it colors
pane_bg File list / dialog / overlay / filter-bar background
pane_fg File rows
pane_fg_dir Directory rows
pane_selected_fg Text of selected files
pane_cursor_bg Cursor row, and the pane's focus rectangle
header_bg Column-header gradient, input borders
muted_fg Header text, labels, checkboxes, item descriptions
bright_fg Input text, status-bar text, highlighted matches
border Overlay / filter-bar border, status-bar top edge
input_bg Text fields (rename editor, prompts)
window_bg Window and dialog chrome
statusbar_bg_top Status-bar gradient
popup_bg Quicksearch / command-palette background
popup_item_fg Command-palette entry titles
popup_selected_bg Selected entry in the palette

Everything else is derived from these; override one only if the inherited value looks wrong. The derived names are base_bg, readonly_fg, input_border, locationbar_border, palette_midlight, statusbar_bg_bottom, popup_query_border, popup_query_inner_border, popup_divider_top, popup_divider_bottom, popup_input_border, popup_input_bg, popup_input_fg, popup_input_border_top / _left / _right, main_window_bg, button_bg, alt_row_bg, button_fg, palette_mid, palette_dark and palette_shadow.

Transparency

A theme may also make fman's window see-through. This is the one thing in a theme file that is not a color, so it sits beside colors, not inside it:

{
	"colors": { "pane_bg": "#000000" },
	"opacity": 0.92
}
  • 1.0 is fully opaque, 0.3 the most transparent fman allows. A value outside that range, or one that is not a number, is ignored.
  • The whole window fades, text included. Dialogs are separate windows and stay opaque.
  • Leaving the key out means fully opaque, not "keep what the last theme had" — switching themes always sets the opacity.
  • Your own choice beats the theme's; see Window opacity.
  • The bundled Matrix theme ships slightly translucent.

Fonts, padding and pinning a color

Colors are one thing, sizes another — a theme file cannot change font size or padding. Those live in a stylesheet, and yours goes in:

%APPDATA%/fman/Plugins/User/Settings/Theme.css

That file loads last, so it wins over every theme. Edit it to change font sizes or padding, or to pin a color a theme keeps changing. To use a theme's own color in it, write the color's name with a $:

.statusbar { color: $pane_fg; }

Put only what you change in that file. Copying fman's whole base stylesheet into it copies its color values too, and those then override every theme — the classic symptom is a command palette that stays light-on-dark after you switch to a light theme.

The selectors it understands are * (everything), th (column headers), .statusbar, .locationbar, .quicksearch-query, .quicksearch-item, and .quicksearch-item-title / -highlight / -hint / -description.

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