Themes

Chronicle ships with three built-in themes. Set the theme in your chronicle.yaml:

theme:
  name: default

Default Theme

A traditional documentation layout with three-column design.

theme:
  name: default

Layout

Left sidebar — Collapsible navigation tree with page icons
Main content — Centered content area
Right sidebar — Table of contents (auto-generated from headings)
Top navbar — Site title, search button, navigation links, theme toggle

Features

Responsive sidebar (collapsible on mobile)
Keyboard-accessible search (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K)
Light/dark mode toggle
Breadcrumb navigation
Active heading tracking in table of contents

Paper Theme

A book-style layout optimized for long-form reading.

theme:
  name: paper

Layout

Left sidebar — Chapter-style navigation
Main content — Centered content area with reading-optimized width
Reading progress — Progress indicator for current page

Features

Minimal, distraction-free design
Reading progress tracking
Optimized typography for long content
Light and dark mode

Fanfold Theme

A continuous-form line printer look — tractor-feed strips down both edges, faint zebra banding behind the page, and monospace type throughout.

theme:
  name: fanfold

Layout

Left rail — A section switcher, then the page tree for the section you are in
Sheet — Centered content with a printed header block and a footer block
Right rail — Table of contents plus configured links

Features

Header block prints the breadcrumb trail and a page counter, then whatever the page gives as identifiers — falling back to the site name and path
Page title set in a dot-matrix face that steps down in size as titles get longer
Everything on the sheet is held to one 80-column measure, so prose, tables, code and rules share the same edges
Code blocks print as ruled listings with a line-number gutter. A fence with no language is treated as a drawing rather than a listing and gets no numbers, so ASCII diagrams keep their own alignment
Tables print as field maps with no cell borders. A wide table with a column of prose in it has its columns measured at build time, and folds that column under each row behind a toggle, so the paragraph reads at the full width of the sheet instead of a narrow column
Uses a page's short label in the rail and the header trail
Its own landing page: a masthead over a register of every section
Light and dark mode

Landing page

When landing is turned on, this theme prints its own cover sheet instead of the shared card grid. It shows an ident line, the site title in the dot-matrix face, the site description, and then every content directory as a numbered row with its path and description.

Set it in chronicle.yaml:

latest:
  landing: true