Themes and language

Built-in themes

kknow has two built-in themes: Gruvbox dark and Gruvbox light. Select a theme in the gear menu in the status bar, or in Settings → Appearance.

Your own theme

A theme is a JSON file with values for the style variables. It is not a stylesheet.

{
  "name": "Sepia",
  "base": "light",
  "variables": { "bg": "#f6efe0", "text": "#3f3527", "accent": "#9c5b28" }
}

base selects the built-in theme to start from: light or dark. kknow applies your variables on top of it, so you set only the colors you want to change.

Put the file in one of two places:

Place	Who sees the theme
<vault>/.kknow/themes/<name>.json	only this vault
the shared themes/ folder	all vaults

On macOS, the shared folder is ~/Library/Application Support/dev.kknow.desktop/themes/. Settings → Appearance has a button that opens it. A vault theme has a Make shared button that copies it there.

To change a built-in theme, put a file with its name (gruvbox.json or gruvbox-light.json) into the shared folder or into a vault.

Safety

kknow accepts colors, font names and color functions. It rejects url(…) and all other values that use the network. A theme can come from another person's vault, and you have no reason to trust it.

A typo in a variable name does not break the theme. kknow themes reports it:

kknow --vault ~/notes themes

Interface language

The interface has two languages: Russian (the default) and English. Change it in the gear menu or in Settings → General. kknow does not follow the system language: you select it, and kknow keeps it.

The labels are in the locales/ folder of the repository, one i18next JSON file per language. To add a language:

1. Copy locales/ru.json to locales/<code>.json and translate it.
2. Add the code to LOCALES in src-tauri/src/menu.rs.
3. Run pnpm ui:test. It checks that the file has all keys and placeholders.

Error messages from the core and the CLI output stay in Russian.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can change any shortcut. See Keyboard shortcuts → Change a shortcut.