Appearance

The Settings → Appearance section lets you change how JustWrite looks. Everything here is reversible, none of it touches your manuscript, and there are presets if you don’t want to fiddle.

This page covers what each control does and when you’d want to change it.

Theme presets

The top of the Appearance section is a row of curated theme tiles. Click a tile to apply a complete bundle of settings — mode, fonts, accents, button shape — in one go. The live preview pane next to it updates instantly.

New installs open in Fine Press — Fraunces display + Spline Sans UI, oxblood accent, neutral surfaces, full-width editor with paragraph indent. Other curated tiles: Studio (Geist + teal, white surfaces), Ivory Press (cream paper, italic display), Calm Modern (Geist + teal, neutral surfaces, justified paragraphs), Editorial (Newsreader + indigo, cool surfaces, mono headings).

You can save your own preset once you’ve tuned things to your liking. A Save current… tile appears whenever any individual knob is changed from a preset’s baseline.

If at any point things look wrong, the Reset to defaults button at the bottom of the page restores every Appearance setting (Fine Press) while keeping any saved custom presets.

Mode

Match system — follow your operating system’s dark/light setting (recommended)
Light — always light
Dark — always dark

Typography

“I’ve been writing for three hours and my eyes are burning. I don’t know if it’s the font or the screen or just the hour, but I need to change something before I call it.”

These are the controls that most affect daily writing comfort.

Font pairings

Quick-select tiles that set the UI font and display font together. Each is a curated combination.

Individual fonts

If you don’t want a pairing:

UI font — buttons, menus, labels
Display font — titles, headings, big numbers
Editor body font — your manuscript prose

The Editor body font is the one you’ll stare at for the most hours. Pick whatever you can read for a long session. Serif fonts (Lora, Source Serif, Merriweather) are easier on the eyes for long reading; sans-serif fonts (Inter, Source Sans) are crisper for short bursts.

UI scale

A percentage slider that scales every label, control, and prose together. Useful for:

High-DPI displays where defaults look small
Sharing your screen and wanting bigger text
Eye strain after a long session

Section heading style and size

The small uppercase labels grouping the sidebar nav (“Manuscript”, “Story world”). Style and size are independent.

Each sidebar entry row. Adjust if the nav feels cramped or too sparse.

Accents

JustWrite has two accent colours. Both are user-tunable.

Accent (primary)

The main app accent. Drives:

Selection highlights
The active sidebar item
Primary buttons and links

Choose from preset swatches or set a precise hue with the numeric input (0–360).

Accent 2

A second accent for visual contrast. Drives:

Progress rings
Rules and peak markers in charts
The “accent2” button intent (used for things like the Resume CTA)

A common pattern: pick a calm cool colour for Accent and a warm or bright colour for Accent 2. The two are visible side-by-side on Home (the goal ring is Accent 2, the active nav item is Accent).

Functional colours

Three colours that carry meaning in the UI:

Success — green by default, used for confirmation, “Done” statuses, success toasts
Danger — red by default, used for destructive actions, the Danger zone, error toasts
Info — blue by default, used for informational chips and tags

Each has preset hues and a numeric picker. Re-tinting re-skins all matching buttons, tags, and status chips.

You can break the convention — make Danger orange, make Success teal — but the colours carry meaning, so unconventional choices may catch you out. The defaults are common enough that they read naturally.

Backgrounds

“I write late at night and the white page is basically a flashlight pointed at my face. I want something warmer that I can actually sit with for two hours.”

These set the canvas the rest of the app sits on.

App background tint — the colour behind everything
Sidebar background tint — the colour behind the navigation
Editor paper tint — the colour of the manuscript page itself (try a slight off-white or cream for long reading)
Text colour family — the ink palette
Apply editor paper to inline fields — a checkbox that makes character / note / worldbuilding rich-text fields pick up the paper tint, so the whole app feels unified rather than two different surfaces

Each tint has curated swatches plus a free colour picker.

The Editor paper tint is the one worth spending a minute on. A pure-white background is glaring; a slight warm cream is easier on the eyes over a long session. If you write at night, a darker paper tint plus dark mode reduces strain. Find a combination you can actually live in.

Editor layout

“The edge-to-edge text stretches all the way across my monitor and I keep losing my place at the end of each line. I just want it to look like a page.”

Two options:

Full width — the editor takes the full width of the window edge-to-edge
Page — the editor is centred with margins, with a running head showing the book title and chapter

Page mimics a printed page and is what most writers prefer. Full width is useful on small windows or for users who want every pixel for prose.

Editor writing defaults

“The lines feel crammed together and I can’t tell where one paragraph ends and the next begins. I’m rereading the same sentence twice.”

These are global defaults for the editor. Per-chapter overrides are available in the editor’s writing-settings gear icon (which takes precedence over these).

Font size — Small (15px) / Medium (18px) / Big (21px)
Line spacing — 1.3 / 1.4 / 1.5 / 1.6 / 1.7 / 1.8 / 2.0
Paragraph spacing — 0 / 0.3em / 0.5em / 0.8em / 1em
First-line indent — Indent / No indent

These are the second-biggest comfort lever after font choice. Line spacing of 1.6–1.8 is easier to read than the tight default 1.3; a paragraph spacing of 0.3em makes prose breathe. First-line indent is a taste call — indented paragraphs feel like a book, no-indent feels like the web.

Buttons

Three knobs that change the feel of every button in the app:

Corner radius

Sharp (2px) — strict, technical look
Standard (6px) — default
Rounded (10px) — softer
Pill (999px) — fully rounded ends

Density

Compact — smaller padding, tighter clicks
Comfy — more padding, more breathing room

Label casing

Default — sentence case
Uppercase — automatic uppercase with adjusted letter-spacing

These are cosmetic — they don’t affect what buttons do, only how they look. Adjust to taste.

A practical setup

If you don’t want to fiddle, the defaults are fine. If you do want to tune, a sensible order:

Mode first — match system unless you have a reason.
Font pairing — pick one tile.
Editor paper tint — try a cream or pale beige.
Editor body font — choose what you can read for hours.
Editor writing settings — bump line spacing to 1.6 or 1.7 if the default feels tight.
Accent — pick a colour you like seeing.
Save preset so you don’t have to redo it.

UI language

The language picker lives here in Settings → Appearance (it travels with the look-and-feel settings). Switching it changes the interface language and date/number formatting — never your manuscript prose. The names JustWrite ships — the statuses, the worldbuilding categories, and on the AI page the features, presets and providers — follow it too until you rename one; a name you have changed stays as you wrote it in every language. English and Spanish ship today; more arrive with app updates. (For contributors: a language is one JSON file in src/i18n/locales/ — no registry to edit — and the picker names each language in itself.)