Add more preset themes or basic colour settings

EmeraldSlash

There are only two preset options (in dark mode): a lowest contrast bluish theme and a higher contrast dark theme.

I prefer lower contrast themes as they are easier on the eyes (text isn't being burned into my retinas), but I dislike Kagi's default bluish theme because I tend to find non-greyscale background colors uncomfortable. I also try to avoid the colour blue on screens at night.

My general preference for dark-mode themes is a dark (but not too dark) grey background, with light grey text. Discord's dark mode colour scheme is an example of this (note that it's very slightly blue, but unnoticeably so).

It would be nice if there were some more preset options for themes. I think some lower contrast grey themes in both light mode and dark mode would be good options regardless of my personal taste since they're neutral.

However I'm sure other people have their own variety of preferences, so I think it would be more scalable to just give some basic, user-friendly settings for background color, text color, accent, etc. in light mode and dark mode.

I don't use the custom CSS feature because it has no documentation and I found it too hard to figure out the weird variable stuff and get the correct identifiers for things. And regardless the custom CSS feature is a non-starter for non-technical users in this regard.

Thanks 🙂

Vlad

EmeraldSlash "Not too dark or not too light" is exactly why we have custom CSS 🙂

Have you seen the documentation at https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/custom-css.html ?

EmeraldSlash

Vlad Yup I've seen it, but it doesn't actually document how the CSS is meant to be modified in a practical way 😛 It's sort of just like "in theory you can do this, but you have to figure out the specifics on your own".

There's the video but the examples it goes over are irrelevant to me. When I first watched it I was surprised that it didn't tell you how to change the theme colours. My uninformed heuristic guess would be that that is the #1 thing people would want to change.

In this case the particular information I want is:

What are the recommended classes, IDs, or variables for changing colour-related properties?
What do I need to type into my custom CSS file to make my changes work?

I did experiment with it a bit, looking through source files in the inspector to try and figure out what things I could change, and was able to modify the way certain things were displayed. But I couldn't figure out how to change the overall theme colours reliably, within my attention span. I don't do a lot of web stuff so this just feels arcane and unnecessarily difficult to me.

Value7609

Agreed, I wish there was something similar to the DuckDuckGo appearance settings. https://duckduckgo.com/settings#appearance

You can set the basic stuff like search result colors, snippet/quick answer colors and hover colors. Which I think fits the need for most of the people that don't want to tinker with CSS themselves, but still want to have a customized look (and feel).

exsesx

While tweaking through custom CSS is an option, achieving the desired result can become challenging. Additionally, every new feature introduced in Kagi, bringing new UI elements, can potentially lead to maintenance issues. These problems could be avoided if contributors followed a common design system or developer manual.

DuckDuckGo-like appearance settings don't sound too bad, though.

exsesx

As I mentioned on Discord, I appreciate Kagi's functionality. However, I believe there's room for some design refinement to enhance consistency. A future redesign, perhaps with some elements inspired by user-friendly search interfaces, could be attractive. For example, Google Search's Knowledge Panel is excellent (when searching for something like Ryan Reynolds) — looking forward to seeing Kagi's design evolution!

P.S. This is not entirely related to the topic above, just feedback, I guess.