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LWN Theming Giving LWN a nice dark theme /assets/pngs/code.png 2020-06-19T16:41:16-04:00 true
Technology
LWN
News
Theming
100 Days To Offload

After a poll by @karan, I started thinking about where I get my news and decided to subscribe to LWN. Their content is really good, they've been running for a long time, and I want to support their work. However, I think the default theme is quite terrible. I spent about an hour last night messing with it and I think I improved it significantly; it's based on the theme of this site.

The theme has a dark background, vibrant pink links, and light text

Screenshot of my LWN theme

After subscribing, navigate to your account page then click the link under Customization. The following tables are the options and values I've set for my theme but note that I have not changed the Old (seen) comment background color as I haven't had an opportunity to experience what that looks like yet. Once I do, I'll update my theme and this post accordingly.

Display preferences

Option Value
Page background colour #292a2d
Left column background #292a2d
Middle column background #292a2d
Headline background #3b3d42
Form/byline background #292a2d
Sidebar background #292a2d
Text colour #f5f4f7
Link colour #fe5186
Visited link colour #d0738f
Quoted text (in email) colour #7ec699
Old (seen) comment background colour #cccccc
Navigation box on printable page
Minimum width of main text column (em) 40
Maximum width of main text column (em) 50
Display old parent in unread comments screen 🟩 (unchecked)

New page engine preferences

Option Value
Use the new page engine
Left column color #292a2d
Maximum width for handset presentation (em) 48
Fixed navigation menu on small screens
Font family to use 🔘 sans-serif

Quoted text preferences

Option Value
Quoted text style 🔘 normal
Quoted text weight 🔘 bolder
Quoted text colour #a9a9b3
Quoted text background #292a2d

After applying the changes, this is what comments look like:

The theme is basically the same as above with slightly lighter headers and a soft green for the quotes

Screenshot of LWN comments

Conclusion

I'm already happy with my LWN subscription and plan to remain subscribed for a long time. The recent post about Tools to improve English text looks especially interesting and something I'm already looking into for Arbor's documentation (big blog post about the project coming soon™). If you have an extra $3.50/mo, I really encourage you to subscribe to LWN. News is important and high-quality news especially so. Blinding though the default theme may be, LWN is, bar none, the best news site I've ever seen and I want to ensure they stick around.


This was day 12 of #100DaysToOffload, an awesome idea from Kev Quirk. If you want to participate, just write something every day for 100 days and post a link on social media with the hashtag!