Show HN: Shadcn/UI theme editor – Design and share Shadcn themes

(shadcnthemer.com)

135 points by miketromba 9 days ago

43 comments

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Hey, I built https://ShadcnThemer.com - a web app for creating and sharing themes for shadcn/ui, made with my some of my favorites, Next.js 15, Tailwind CSS 4, Drizzle ORM, and Supabase.

The goal was to make it easy to visually design shadcn color themes, preview them live across various example UIs, and export them straight into your projects (as CSS or via the shadcn CLI registry command).

I had a bit of experience going into this because I built the Theme Studio for VS Code in the past, but it was fun using a modern stack and leveraging Cursor to help me along the way this time.

GitHub: https://github.com/miketromba/shadcn-themer

lavela 9 days ago

I tried to open different themes in tabs for comparison, but I would have to first open each one and then manually copy the URL into a new tab because you implemented your links as <button> (which prevents both middle-click and 'open in new tab' context menu option to work).

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  • miketromba 8 days ago

    Just shipped a fix, middle-click should work now. Thanks for the feedback

    Reply View 0 replies
  • tacker2000 9 days ago

    Yup, this is the incompetence that we see all over the place since these new frameworks have come and front end devs have no idea what HTML actually is or how it works.

    Buttons are for submitting forms and nothing else.

    In HTML a link is created using an <a> element.

    React has a <Link> element for this purpose, it will be rendered as <a>.

    Please OP, at least try to learn a little bit about the underlying technologies.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • robertoandred 9 days ago

      It has nothing to do with "new frameworks". ASP devs have been making buttons into links for decades.

      Also, React does not have a Link element. Please at least try to learn a little bit about the underlying technologies.

      Reply View 1 reply
meindnoch 9 days ago

>Sign in or create an account with your email

Into the trash it goes.

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  • miketromba 8 days ago

    I get this. Just shipped the ability to create and edit themes locally, no auth required. The local theme gets persisted to localstorage and you can optionally save/share it later. It also works seamlessly with the fork / import features, so those can be used without auth as well.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • calmworm 8 days ago

      WebAuthn has been a great alternative in my limited experience. Email for backup.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • slig 9 days ago

    That's unfair. You can browse, preview and get the CSS variables without signing up.

    Reply View 8 replies
    • LoganDark 9 days ago

      Email magic links are dumb. On top of that, forms that don't let you specify whether to login or to create an account are extra dumb. With magic links, one can't log in with just their password manager, and with a stupid combo form, anyone who mis-types or mis-remembers their email address just accidentally created a new account (or a new link that creates an account).

      Reply View 7 replies
      • devilsdata 9 days ago

        Email magic links are inconvenient for the user, but they're not dumb. They're a pretty good option for a small project by a developer doesn't want to implement a whole auth flow, or pay for an OAuth provider.

        It's a tradeoff. If you roll your own password flow, you need to add MFA to be secure. The complexity of what you need to build and maintain goes up.

        A simple magic link flow for an app like this, where you are really only likely to log into it once per project you start.

        Personally though, I also use a password manager. And I am annoyed enough by email magic links, that any of my personal projects will at least have a passkey implementation.

        So I agree they're annoying. But they're definitely not "dumb". They're a tradeoff. This developer has chosen his own time over user convenience; which is a common tradeoff for small developers.

        Reply View 5 replies
      • tonyhart7 8 days ago

        "Email magic links are dumb."

        True, every login must be standardized around social auth and oauth2

        Reply View 0 replies
programmarchy 9 days ago

I spent some time attempting to "derive" a theme given a primary and secondary color, but realized my color theory wasn't strong enough to build something reliable (I tried with both hsl and oklch). Curious if that's really possible.

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slig 9 days ago

Thanks for sharing! What's the difference between your app and tweakcn?

edit: would also love to be able to open preview on new tabs with middle-click.

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  • miketromba 9 days ago

    Tweakcn is a great tool too. Main difference is I'm hoping ShadcnThemer will be more of a community-driven hub for sharing, starring, and forking themes - similar to how color palette websites have 1000's of user-made palettes. (I took this approach when building the Theme Studio for VS Code and it worked really well, 1000's of themes were designed and shared.)

    Tweakcn also charges $ users to be able to share and save themes which I think is silly for a tool like this, should be 100% free and open source.

    I also prefer the simple UX of ShadcnThemer better but I'm biased of course.

    Reply View 0 replies
sreekanth850 8 days ago

Not related to this directly, but shadcn drawer is built on the top of vaul which is unmintained, so who ever use this in production, keep this in your mind.

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  • rochak 8 days ago

    Gotta love the JS ecosystem where devs move faster than users.

    Reply View 4 replies
    • tonyhart7 8 days ago

      and people complain about "why LLM produce outdated code" lol

      this is why ecosystem that stable like Go is better for vibe coding

      Reply View 3 replies
      • h33t-l4x0r 8 days ago

        How are you vibe coding web dashboards in Go?

        Reply View 2 replies
jzig 9 days ago

The only changes I see are colors but what if I want eg a different border radius on buttons or margin on labels or specific fonts on elements etc? I don’t find changing only the colors of components particularly valuable but would like to see more variance in the actual shapes and looks of things.

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  • miketromba 9 days ago

    Global border radius is editable, that setting is at the bottom of the sidebar. The challenge with global shadcn theming is that you're limited to adjusting the css variables they provide. I believe there is a global spacing variable, but it is not so specific that you can target e.g. just label spacing. That would be something you could modify directly within your shadcn input components via adjusting the tailwind class(es).

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[removed] 9 days ago
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QuantumNomad_ 9 days ago

The infinite scroll makes it difficult to reach the links in the footer, at least on mobile.

Footer links:

GitHub repo https://github.com/miketromba/shadcn-themer

Three other links also in the footer but they only bring me to login screen:

Terms of Service https://shadcnthemer.com/terms

Privacy policy https://shadcnthemer.com/privacy

Contact https://shadcnthemer.com/contact

Reply View 2 replies
  • lardissone 9 days ago

    I still can't believe this is still an issue. When lazy-loading/infinite-scroll appeared main problem was that your footer shouldn't contain any actionable information. And people still makes fall into the same issue years after.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • triyambakam 8 days ago

      Really I don't see how you can have a footer at all on a page with infinite scroll

      Reply View 0 replies
imcritic 9 days ago

What is shadcn?

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  • rafram 8 days ago

    The Bootstrap of the 2020s. Just the default components people copy-paste into Tailwind-based SaaS apps.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • ramon156 9 days ago

    A customizable component library built on radix.

    Not sure why this upsets people, is it because it's popular and therefore bad?

    Reply View 0 replies
  • stravant 8 days ago

    The key piece of the stack it gives you is sensible cross-platform component behaviors to put your styling / branding on to of.

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  • icemelt8 9 days ago

    default UI of the internet

    Reply View 3 replies
    • deaux 8 days ago

      I'm being very pedantic here in true HN fashion, but at most it's the default UI of VC-funded B2B SaaS startups. 95% of the internet-using world never comes across shadcn UIs.

      Reply View 2 replies
      • icemelt8 3 days ago

        not at all, Shadcn has been a game changer for all young, bootstrapped and individual developers. Who now have a professional looking UI available for free and easy to use.

        There are echo chambers and availability biases, it takes a bigger person to know that they live in one.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • ivape 8 days ago

        It’s also looks like some shit you can make in a weekend. There must have been a boot camp behind pushing it.

        Reply View 0 replies