Themes

Processing 4 has a new set of colors and overall design. As of beta 9 (released 4 August 2022), these changes have settled into place for the final 4.0 release.

Check out Tools → Theme Selector to use the new theme engine, which makes it possible to select interface colors from a set of options, as well as more control over choosing your own schemes.

Some notes about how it works:

• There are sixteen solid color themes available (the “Minerals” collection) and sixteen gradient themes (the “Alloys” collection).

• To create your own custom theme, visit Tools → Theme Selector and click “Save theme.txt to your sketchbook for editing”.

• If you have a theme.txt file in your sketchbook, click the “Reload theme.txt to update the current theme“ link at the bottom of the Theme Selector to see your changes applied to the interface. (You can also restart Processing to see changes, but that's much slower, so less fun.)

• If you have a custom theme in your sketchbook and select one of the built-in themes in the Theme Selector window, Processing will resave your theme.txt file under a new name (theme.001, theme.002, etc.)

• If you used Processing 4 before beta 9, the theme.txt in your sketchbook folder will be renamed (not deleted!) and the colors reset. If this was a custom theme, you'll need to update it to match the theme.txt file found in the Processing download. There were many, many changes between beta 8 and beta 9.

• Toolbar and tab icons are generated from SVG files based on theme colors.

• Starting with 4.0 alpha 6, all colors (and most fonts) are specified in the theme.txt file. This is a shift from Processing 3, which had some entries stored in preferences.txt and others in theme.txt.