Skip to the content
Back to Nymchat

Knowledge base Making it yours

Themes and layout

Six themes, two chat layouts, two surface treatments, seven wallpaper patterns and eighteen notification sounds. All of it lives under Settings › Appearance, except the sound, which is under Messaging & Display.

Themes

The Appearance settings section, with a Light/Auto/Dark switch, app language, theme picker and chat view options.
Appearance settings.

Light, Auto or Dark sits at the top; Auto follows your system preference. Under it, six themes, each of which works in both light and dark:

Theme
Bitchat (Multicolor)The default. Nyms are colored individually, so who is speaking is legible at a glance.
Matrix GreenGreen on black, terminal-style.
Amber TerminalThe amber CRT.
CyberpunkNeon magenta and cyan.
Hacker BlueCool blue monochrome.
Ghost (B&W)Black and white, no accent color at all.
The Bitchat Multicolor theme, with each nym in its own color.
Bitchat (Multicolor)
The Matrix Green theme, green text on black.
Matrix Green
The Amber Terminal theme, amber text on black.
Amber Terminal
The Cyberpunk theme, in neon magenta and cyan.
Cyberpunk
The Hacker Blue theme, in cool blue monochrome.
Hacker Blue
The Ghost theme, black and white with no accent color.
Ghost (B&W)

Each of them also has a light variant, which is what the Light setting — or a system preference, on Auto — switches to.

Nymchat in light mode, showing the Matrix Green theme on a light background.
Light mode, on the Matrix Green theme.

Visual Transparency switches every surface — messages, modals, sidebars — between Solid and a translucent Glass look. Solid is the default and is the easier of the two to read over a busy wallpaper.

Chat layout and text size

Three independent choices:

SettingOptionsDefault
Chat ViewSingle Chat, or Column ViewSingle Chat
Message ThreadsEnabled, or Disabled (classic flat view)Enabled
Message LayoutBubbles, or IRC StyleBubbles
Text Size12–28 px, on a slider15 px

Column View puts channels, private messages and group chats side by side in scrollable columns you can add, remove and drag to reorder, rather than looking at one conversation at a time. A Reset columns to defaults button undoes an arrangement you have got lost in.

Message Threads groups replies under the message they answer, opened in place from any message — covered in full under Messages. Disabling it shows every reply inline, the classic flat view.

IRC Style drops the bubbles for one dense line per message, which fits far more history on a screen.

A Nymchat channel with the Bubbles message layout.
Bubbles: one rounded card per message.
The same Nymchat channel with the IRC Style message layout: one dense timestamped line per message.
IRC Style: the same conversation, one line each.
Nymchat in Column View, with several conversations open side by side.
Column View: several conversations at once.

Text Size scales all text in the app, not just messages.

Wallpapers

Chat Wallpaper sits behind the message area. Seven built-in patterns — Geometric, Circuit, Dots, Waves, Topography, Hexagons and Diamonds — plus None, or Upload your own image (at least 1920×1080).

In Column View there is a second, narrower choice: Column Message Wallpaper decides whether the wallpaper shows through each column's message area or each column gets a solid background instead.

Notification sounds

Notification Sound, under Settings › Messaging & Display, is Classic Beep by default. The rest are, in order: Low Tone, High Ping, ICQ Uh-Oh, MSN Alert, MSN Nudge, Nokia SMS, Nokia Tune, Dial-Up Modem, Mario Coin, Mario 1-Up, Mario Power-Up, Zelda Secret, Game Boy Boot, Tetris, Pokémon Heal, Communicator Chirp, F1 Radio — and Silent.

The tones are synthesized in the app rather than played from audio files, which is why they cost nothing to download and sound identical on every platform.