Modern Theme

[christopherjones]

Hi there, I was a little disappointed to see that the interface on the homepage isn't what Tachyon's default theme looks like. I wanted something a little more modern for some of my clients to use so I made this modern theme. I wanted to share this in case anyone else was interested in using it.

https://github.com/christopherjones/tachyon-theme-modern

[kimusan]

Wow that looks really nice.i am n8t much of a designer myself so the best I could do was the tachyon and Dracula themes (personally I think that both areimprovements over the default theme that snappymail used to ship with).
Do you want your themes ro be integrated into tachyon or do you prefer to keep them on you own repo?

[christopherjones]

Thank you! If you think it’s worth integrating into Tachyon I think that would be great. Happy to help either way, I just thought others might enjoy it!

[kimusan]

Are there any other differences between than than an "accent color"? I am wondering it it could be integrated as just "modern" and then open up to change between the different accent colors

[christopherjones]

No differences other than accent colors (each also has a dark mode). I considered the idea of having a single theme with some sort of plugin that allowed for accent color selection but figured I’d just stick with pure css for now to see what people thought.

[kimusan]

I will test it out and see if i can find a good solution. I will try to integrate your theme and see if i can make a way to make accent colors available too (maybe other themes could use that too).t

[kimusan]

First, a huge thank you for making this and sharing it. Modern is now in Tachyon as one theme, and it will ship in the next release.

Your seven variants are now palettes of that one theme. A theme can now list its palettes in a theme.json next to its styles.css:

{"default":"modern","accents":{"plum":{"name":"Plum","swatch":"#6d3fd1"}, ...}}

When a theme has palettes, Settings → Themes shows a row of swatches under the theme picker, and the admin can set the default palette under General. The choice goes on <html> as data-accent="plum". The page is rendered with it from the server, so the login page opens in the right colours too.

That changed the shape of the CSS a little. The shared rules appear once, and each variant's --m-* token block now sits under :root[data-accent="id"], with one copy for dark and one for the system dark scheme. The default tokens stay as they were. Anyone who installed one of your variants as a custom theme (ModernPlum and the others) can remove the folder and lands on Modern with the matching palette.

Testing turned up two things in the message list that you may want in your own repo as well:

• In the two-line rows (side by side and on phones), a message from today shows only a short time like "21:27". Sender, time and subject then fit on line 1 and the sender gets squeezed to nothing. Giving the sender a basis of the 56px the subject leaves fixes it: .senderParent { flex: 1 1 56px; } in those rows.
• The star on unflagged messages only appears on hover, so on a phone you can't star from the list. It now stays dimmed under @media (hover: none).

Your MIT LICENSE ships with the theme, and the README and changelog credit you. The theme is in tachyon/v/0.0.0/themes/Modern/ if you want to send changes straight to Tachyon from now on; a PR against that folder is the easiest route.

[kimusan]

and a bit of a teaser and thank you here : https://tachyonmail.app/#/news/2026-11-10-modern-theme-and-accent-palettes