Personalize
Mindly ships Light, Dark, and Ocean today. More are in development. Pick the one your eyes thank you for at hour three of a writing session.
How it works
When to use it
Off-white background with subtle warm grey panels. Sharp contrast for daytime work. Reads cleanly in direct sunlight and when projecting to a screen during a presentation. The default for users with reliable indoor lighting.
Deep slate background (not pure black) with soft light text. Keeps your eyes intact past midnight. Saves battery on MacBook Pro OLED panels. The preferred choice for users who write or research after 8 PM.
Pale blue background with dark navy text and a deeper blue accent. Calmer than Light, warmer than Dark. Reads well in mixed lighting and matches macOS Sonoma's newer wallpapers. The "third option" most users settle on after trying both extremes.
Mindly reads macOS Appearance and switches Light to Dark automatically at your set time, or when you flip the system toggle. No manual switching, no jarring transitions. The "set it once" option.
What you can actually customize
Most note apps offer two: light and dark. Mindly adds Ocean as a third option, designed for users who find pure white too harsh and pure dark too low-contrast for daytime work. Each theme is hand-tuned, not just a colour inversion of the other.
Pick a theme once and it propagates to every surface: the capture overlay that floats above other apps, the main library view, the mind map graph, the notes editor, the settings pane, the search results. No surface uses a different colour scheme. The visual identity stays consistent.
The blue accent used for links, tags, selected items, and focus rings shifts per theme. Light uses a saturated cool blue. Dark uses a brighter sky blue for contrast against the slate background. Ocean uses a desaturated navy that matches its palette. The accent never clashes with the surface.
When Mindly is generating tags, summaries, or mind map connections in the background, the theme stays stable. No flashing, no loading skeletons in the wrong colour, no temporary white frames. The visual layer is independent of the data layer.
Why it matters
You can live with a note app you only open twice a week. You cannot live with the one you open thirty times a day if it feels wrong. A second brain is a daily-driver tool, more like a code editor or a terminal than a word processor: you stare at it for hours, your eyes adapt to its colours, and your mood gets shaped by them. The theme question is not cosmetic. It is whether the surface you spend three hours a day reading is one your eyes actually want to look at. Light and Dark are the basics every app should ship, and most do. Ocean exists because the middle ground (between aggressive contrast and low-contrast night mode) is where a lot of people actually want to work, and almost no note app gives them the option. The fact that this page exists at all is the answer to the question of how seriously Mindly takes the choice.
Common questions
Yes. The Dark theme uses a deep slate background (not pure black) with soft light text and a brighter sky-blue accent. It applies consistently across the capture overlay, library, mind map, editor, and settings. You can also set Mindly to follow macOS Appearance so Dark turns on automatically at night.
Three: Light, Dark, and Ocean. Light for bright daytime work, Dark for late nights and OLED displays, and Ocean (pale blue background, navy text) for the middle ground between the two. Additional themes are in development.
A pale blue background with dark navy text and a desaturated blue accent. It sits between Light (high contrast white) and Dark (low contrast slate). Useful in mixed lighting, easier on the eyes during long writing sessions, and matches macOS Sonoma's blue-leaning wallpapers visually.
Yes if you turn on system matching. In Settings, choose "Match system" and Mindly flips between Light and Dark whenever your Mac does, at the schedule you set in System Settings. Manual override is available any time.
Not yet. The three themes are hand-designed for visual consistency and ship as fixed palettes. Custom theme creation is a roadmap item; we are prioritizing it once the base themes are validated against real long-session usage.
Yes. The mind map uses theme-aware colours: node fills, edge weights, and the background gradient all adapt to whichever theme is active. The map looks intentional in every theme, not just retrofitted from a light-mode original.
Also in Mindly
Related reading
Get started
Download Mindly, try each of the three themes for a day, and settle into the one your eyes stop noticing.