Eighteen colour schemes ship alongside Light and Dark, and a theme is just a small text file — so you can change one, or write your own, without waiting for anybody.
Settings, Appearance, Theme. The list starts with the three that are always there and then names every other theme:
| Same as Windows | The default. Follows the Windows app colour mode and keeps following it if you change it later. |
| Light, Dark | The two base palettes. Every other theme is built on one of them. |
| Light-based | Sepia, Solarized Light, Catppuccin Latte, GitHub Light. |
| Dark-based | Midnight, Solarized Dark, Catppuccin Mocha, Tokyo Night, One Dark, Monokai, Nord, Dracula, Rose Pine, Everforest Dark, Kanagawa, Gruvbox Dark, Zenburn, GitHub Dark. |
The theme applies as you move through the list, including with the arrow keys, so you can see it rather
than imagine it. Nothing is saved until you press OK or Apply — Cancel, Esc and the close button
all put the previous theme back.
Every window follows at once, including any open history window. The notification-area icon does not: it follows the Windows taskbar colour, which is a separate Windows setting.
Themes live in a themes folder beside your settings, one .json file each. The four
buttons under the Theme setting are all you need:
| Duplicate… | Writes the colours currently in force to a new file and opens it. Every key is listed with the colour it has now, and a comment saying what it paints, so you start from something that already works. It never overwrites: if the name is taken, a number is added. |
| Edit… | Opens this theme's file. A shipped theme has no file until you edit it, so one is written out first under its own name — which means your edit replaces that theme. Light, Dark and Same as Windows cannot be edited in place, since they are the palettes everything else is built on; those are copied to a new name instead. |
| Reload | Re-reads the folder and applies the selection again. Press this after saving an edit — nothing else tells PasteJump that you have finished typing. |
| Folder | Opens the folder, in case you would rather manage the files yourself. |
A name, which palette it is built on, and as many colours as you care to set:
{
"name": "My Theme",
"basedOn": "dark",
"colors": {
"AccentBrush": "#6C7BFF",
"TextBrush": "#E4E8F5",
"SelectionBrush": ["#243056", "#1A2440"]
}
}
| name | What the settings list shows, and how the theme is remembered. Up to 40 characters. It may not be
Light, Dark or System, since those already mean something. A theme sharing a
name with one of the eighteen shipped ones replaces it, which is how you tweak Monokai without inventing a
name for it. |
| basedOn | light or dark, and it does two jobs. It supplies every colour you leave out, and it
tells Windows whether to draw dark title bars and window borders — those are drawn by Windows, not by
PasteJump, so a dark theme claiming to be light gets a white title bar around dark content. Omitted means
light. |
| colors | Any of the keys listed below. Set as few as you like: anything absent comes from the theme named in
basedOn, so a three-line file that changes only the accent is perfectly valid. |
Colours are written as #RRGGBB, #RGB or #AARRGGBB with an alpha channel.
Names such as red are not accepted — write the hex instead. Comments and trailing commas
are allowed, because a file you edit by hand is easier to keep tidy with them.
A mistake is reported, not ignored. If a file will not parse, or names a key that does not exist, or has a colour PasteJump cannot read, that theme is skipped and the reason appears under the Theme setting. A misspelled key is refused for a reason worth knowing: it would otherwise load perfectly and change nothing, and you would have no way to tell that from a colour that merely looks wrong. Key names are case-sensitive.
| Key | What it paints |
|---|---|
| SurfaceBrush | Window background |
| SurfaceRaisedBrush | Raised panels, tooltips and dialogs |
| BorderBrush | Panel edges |
| TextBrush | Ordinary text |
| MutedTextBrush | Secondary text and inline help |
| AccentBrush | Accent: links, chips, the default button's fill |
| WarnBrush | Warnings |
| DangerBrush | Destructive actions, DELETE ALL, the POP chip |
| AccentHoverBrush | Accent fill under the pointer |
| AccentPressedBrush | Accent fill while pressed |
| AccentTextBrush | Text on an accent fill |
| ControlBackgroundBrush | Text boxes, combo boxes, grid headers |
| ControlBorderBrush | Control outlines |
| ControlHoverBrush | Control under the pointer |
| ControlPressedBrush | Control while pressed |
| ControlDisabledTextBrush | Text in a disabled control |
| SelectionBrush | Selected row fill — one colour, or two for a top-to-bottom gradient |
| SelectionBorderBrush | Selected row outline |
| SelectionTextBrush | Text in a selected row |
| HoverBorderBrush | Row under the pointer |
| ModifiedRowBrush | Settings row whose value differs from its default |
| ScrollThumbBrush | Scroll bar thumb |
| ScrollThumbHoverBrush | Scroll bar thumb under the pointer |
| SplitterLineBrush | The line between the list and the preview pane |
| ShadowColor | Overlay and toast drop shadow. A colour rather than a brush, but written the same way |
The selection is worth a word: it is the one place a pair of colours is allowed, drawn as a soft vertical
gradient with an outline over it. A single colour there is accepted and gives a flat fill. The outline does most of
the work of making a selected row read as one object, so it is worth setting
SelectionBorderBrush whenever you change the fill.
A theme named in your settings that no longer exists — a file deleted, a drive not plugged in, a file being edited — falls back to Same as Windows for that session. Your choice is not overwritten, so the theme returns when the file does.