Themes

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.

Choosing one

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.

Writing your own

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.

What a theme file looks like

A name, which palette it is built on, and as many colours as you care to set:

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.

Warning

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.

The colours you can set

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.

If a theme goes missing

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.