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Themes

Kova ships with 11 built-in themes and supports fully custom themes via YAML files.

Selecting a theme

Open the Inspector panel (click ⓘ in the titlebar) and choose a theme from the swatches in the Theme section. The change is instant. Kova saves your selection to the document frontmatter automatically:

---
title: My Presentation
theme: slate
---

You can also set or change the theme by editing theme: directly in the frontmatter.

Built-in themes

ID Style
light Clean white background, dark text — the default
dark Deep charcoal background, light text
institutional Formal navy and white with a structured header bar
minimal No decorative elements; maximum focus on content
editorial Serif typography, warm off-white — editorial / essay feel
slate Dark blue-grey with accent highlights
pitch High-contrast black with bold typographic hierarchy
cosmos Deep space-inspired dark palette with indigo accents
forge Industrial dark with amber highlights
grove Earthy greens and warm neutrals
horizon Gradient sunrise palette, soft and optimistic

Theme library

The More Themes… button in the Inspector links to themes.kova.md, where community-created themes are available to download. Downloads are verified against SHA-256 checksums.

Inspector overrides

Without writing a custom theme file, you can override specific aspects of any built-in theme from the Inspector:

Override What it changes
Primary colour Accent colour used for headings, progress bars, and decorative elements
Background colour Slide background
Text colour Body text
Title font Font used for H1 and H2 headings
Body font Font used for all other text
Code font Monospace font for code blocks
Logo Image displayed in the header or footer
Header text Custom text shown at the top of every slide
Footer text Custom text shown at the bottom — supports {slide_number}, {total}, {title}, {date}

Overrides are saved to theme_overrides in your frontmatter:

---
title: Brand Deck
theme: light
theme_overrides:
  primary: "#0057B8"
  title_font: "Georgia"
  footer: "{title} — Slide {slide_number} of {total}"
---

Custom themes

Create a .yaml file in ~/.kova/themes/ to define a fully custom theme. Kova loads all valid .yaml files from that directory on startup. Any parse errors are reported in Settings → Themes.

File format

# ~/.kova/themes/my-brand.yaml

name: My Brand          # Display name shown in the Inspector
id: my-brand            # Used in frontmatter: theme: my-brand

colors:
  primary:    "#0057B8"   # Accent colour (headings, progress bars, decorations)
  accent:     "#003F8A"   # Secondary accent
  background: "#FFFFFF"   # Slide background
  text:       "#1A1A1A"   # Body text
  muted:      "#6B7280"   # Subdued text (attributions, captions)
  code_bg:    "#F3F4F6"   # Code block background

fonts:
  title: "Georgia, serif"       # H1 and H2
  body:  "Inter, sans-serif"    # All other text
  code:  "JetBrains Mono, monospace"

layout:
  alignment: left         # "left" | "center" | "right" — text alignment on title slide
  decoration: subtle      # "none" | "subtle" | "bold" — decorative pattern intensity

logo:
  path: "./assets/logo.png"   # Path relative to the theme file
  position: header            # "header" | "footer" | "none"
  size: 48px

header: ""               # Text in the header bar on every slide ("" to hide)
footer: "{title}"        # Text in the footer — supports template variables

Template variables

Use these in header and footer strings:

Variable Value
{title} Document title from frontmatter
{date} Document date from frontmatter
{slide_number} Current slide number
{total} Total slide count

Inheriting from built-in themes

Omitted fields inherit from the Light theme defaults. You only need to specify what you want to change:

name: Dark Blue
id: dark-blue

colors:
  background: "#0D1117"
  text:       "#E6EDF3"
  primary:    "#58A6FF"

Applying changes

Edit the YAML file and restart Kova. Changes take effect on startup. Any YAML syntax errors are shown in Settings → Themes with the file path and line number.