Cinder, a NetNewsWire theme

A calm, light-mode only reading theme for NetNewsWire.

Cinder is a restyle of the excellent Ember by Dave Marquard. Ember is warm and fiery; Cinder is what's left once the fire has cooled.

Why?

I really like dark-mode for my operating system chrome, but I prefer the content itself to be in light-mode. I couldn't find a way to configure this in NetNewsWire directly, but it was recommended that I simply modify a theme I liked so it only had a light-mode, and so here we are!

Install

Download the latest Cinder.nnwtheme.zip:

• macOS: unzip and double-click Cinder.nnwtheme, then confirm the install.
• iOS / iPadOS: open the .zip and share it to NetNewsWire.

Then choose Cinder as your article theme in NetNewsWire's settings.

What Cinder changes

• Light only, in NetNewsWire's blue. A warm off-white ground with NetNewsWire's default accent, #086AEE. Dark mode is deliberately switched off, so articles look the same whatever the system appearance.
• Serif headings and quotations. Headings and quoted text are set in Apple's New York serif against the SF Pro body, so a quotation reads as a different voice.
• Quotation marks on quotes. Each quotation opens with an oversized blue quote mark beside the text.
• Citation links. When a citation contains only a bare hyperlink, it is no longer uppercased, as uppercase hyperlinks look weird.
• Quieter openings. No drop cap and no accent bars over section headings.
• Spaced code blocks. Code blocks get the same space around them as a paragraph.
• WordPress image comparison support. WordPress (Jetpack)'s before/after slider doesn't work over RSS, so we show both images stacked and labelled Before and After.

Kept from Ember

All the other excellent features of Ember are still present:

• Apple system fonts (SF Pro) throughout — nothing to download, crisp at every size.
• Prominent pull-quotes with a tinted panel and accent rule.
• Full-bleed images that span the column edge-to-edge, captions kept inset.
• Captions set apart in serif italic, with photo credits in muted small caps.
• Broader footnote support with native-style popovers for common Markdown, Substack, and WordPress footnote formats.
• Platform-tuned — Dynamic Type on iOS, a larger default size on iPad, and a desktop type scale on macOS.

Requirements

A recent version of NetNewsWire (which supports custom .nnwtheme themes) on macOS, iOS, or iPadOS.

The additional footnote formats need NetNewsWire's Article JavaScript setting, which is on by default. With it off, Cinder still renders normally, but only the footnote formats NetNewsWire recognises itself get popovers.

Structure

An .nnwtheme bundle is three files. NetNewsWire always loads its own core.css first, then a theme's stylesheet.css (which fully replaces the default stylesheet).

Cinder.nnwtheme/
├── Info.plist       theme name, identifier, author, version
├── template.html    the article scaffold, plus the inline footnote adapter
└── stylesheet.css   the theme (self-contained; replaces the default)

Developing & testing

Cinder uses nnw-theme, the tooling behind netnewswire-theme-template.

It renders each article through NetNewsWire's own pipeline (its pinned core.css, page skeletons, and scripts) and checks the result in WebKit, so layout work needs neither the app nor a NetNewsWire checkout.

Requirements: Node.js 24 or later (brew install node on macOS). Capturing new fixtures from the running app also needs Xcode and a NetNewsWire clone.

npx nnw-theme@2 setup      # once: install WebKit
npx nnw-theme@2 preview    # live gallery of every fixture; rebuilds on save
npx nnw-theme@2 check      # release gate: every fixture in WebKit, light and dark

Test cases are TOML fixtures in fixtures/ whose keys mirror the [[variables]] in template.html; the tool's built-in article and kitchen-sink fixtures render alongside them. npx nnw-theme@2 capture explains how to save a real article from NetNewsWire as a new one. footnote-providers.toml declares the note each footnote format must open, which check verifies.

Contributor and agent guidance, including how to merge in upstream changes from Ember, lives in AGENTS.md.

Releasing

1. Run npx nnw-theme@2 bump and commit the new Info.plist version.
2. In GitHub, run Actions → Publish theme with the new tag (for example, v1.1).

The workflow checks the theme, refuses a reused tag or a version that did not increase, attaches Cinder.nnwtheme.zip, and writes the release notes from the commits since the last tag with git-cliff. The download link points at releases/latest, so it always picks up the newest release.

Licence

Apache License 2.0. Ember © 2026 Dave Marquard; Cinder's changes © 2026 Ryan Conway.