Improving Theme Selector

[tommyming]

This is a continued discussion from #35552.

Original Problem

Currently, switching between light and dark modes in Zed requires manually opening the theme selector and searching for a specific theme each time. For users who frequently switch environments (e.g., moving between indoors and outdoors) or follow system appearance changes, this manual process is inefficient.

While Zed allows selecting themes, it lacks a quick "toggle" mechanism that remembers a user's preferred choice for each mode, a feature standard in editors like VS Code.

Why continue the discussion??

Although related changes are made on the last issue, better improvements can be done on the theme selector e.g. matching-pairs setup.
But details/new ideas are still under discussion.

References

• Original request: Feature Request: Toggle between preferred Light/Dark Themes #35552

[sammcj]

I was looking for a way to toggle between light and dark mode themes in the quick menu, by hotkey or by filetype (e.g. always open Markdown in light mode, everything else in dark mode) but couldn't find it. I did some digging through a bunch of closed issues and this discussion seems to be the latest one to weigh in on.

[tommyming]

I think adding new hotkey options would be something pretty quick, lemme create a PR later today.
(This only works on users who select theme as dynamic mode, static mode only allows one single theme)

But for "by filetype", I think this would require a bigger extension to the current theme settings.
The simpliest way I would think of right now, is to add a whitelist of file extension (e.g. .md, .txt, etc) that uses light/dark theme(which means probably 2 whitelists), other file extensions are following Zed settings.

[celgost]

Well you could "hack away" by setting up a Zed task that you would assign to a hotkey.

That Zed task could be a bash script that changes your theme directly in the settings.json. It's a bit hacky but I'm sure it would work. Zed tasks are the real "extension layer" of Zed.

[tommyming]

This could always be a way.
Zed Tasks + bash is always the last resort of everything for me tbh.

For the 2 things I mentioned (hotkeys, file-extension based themes) above are also doable, just using bash to do the regex/update settings json.

But these kind of solutions always has a problem of "how to preserve for everyone?", at least for me.
We can create base scripts and shared to the community through github gists, pastebin, etc., but they will eventually lost somehow, easpecially easier these years.
This is also the intention why I wanted to create the PR.

To clarify, Zed tasks are amazing, this "hacky" way is good.

[celgost]

I wonder if we could have a "Tasks" marketplace inside the extensions panel.