Themes and fonts

Settings → Appearance.

Light, dark, or auto

Auto follows your device — light in the day, dark at night, if that’s how you have things set. It’s the default.

A theme is more than a colour

There are 6 themes, and each one is a whole look: the colours, the typeface you write in, the way headings are set, and a small piece of decoration that belongs to that theme alone.

Dawn is the default — sunrise on paper. Vellum is aged paper set in one Garamond throughout, with the scripture reference picked out in red the way a scribe would have done it. Cloister is cool stone and north light, and the one theme set in a clean sans-serif from title to last line. Sabbath is the quiet one, with the widest line spacing and no decoration at all. Plainsong is plain text, in a monospace, for people who like it that way. Vigil is dimmed right down for reading in a dark room.

Each theme comes with both a light and a dark version, so nothing jumps when the sun goes down — pick Vellum once and you get Vellum by day and Vellum by night. Two of the night versions are near-black, which is worth trying if you read in bed.

The full list is in the app, and each row is set in its own typeface so you can see what you’re choosing before you choose it.

If you’d rather pick the font yourself

Your theme brings a typeface that was chosen alongside its colours, which is why there’s no separate font setting in front of you any more.

If you want a different one, open Advanced typography underneath the theme list. Six faces are there — a serif, a literary face, a typewriter face, a monospace, a plain sans, and one designed for maximum legibility if small type is a struggle — plus Follow the theme, which is where it starts.

Choosing one overrides the face only. Everything else about your theme stays.

This changes your writing, not the interface.

Size and spacing

Settings → Writing has the text size, line spacing, and how wide the writing column runs. Your size carries across themes — a theme adjusts it rather than replacing it, so Plainsong’s monospace comes out smaller than Dawn’s serif at the same setting, because monospace runs wider and needs it.

Settings follow you

Everything here is stored with your account, so setting it up on your Mac sets it up on your phone. There’s no per-device configuration to keep in step.

If you ever want to start over, Settings → About has a reset that puts every setting back to its default. It doesn’t touch your entries.