Show HN: Shadcn/UI theme editor – Design and share Shadcn themes
25 comments
·October 25, 2025meindnoch
>Sign in or create an account with your email
Into the trash it goes.
slig
That's unfair. You can browse, preview and get the CSS variables without signing up.
LoganDark
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).
devilsdata
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.
slig
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.
miketromba
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.
lavela
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).
tacker2000
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.
robertoandred
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.
jzig
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.
miketromba
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).
programmarchy
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.
QuantumNomad_
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
lardissone
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.
triyambakam
Really I don't see how you can have a footer at all on a page with infinite scroll
null
imcritic
What is shadcn?
rafram
The Bootstrap of the 2020s. Just the default components people copy-paste into Tailwind-based SaaS apps.
QuantumNomad_
A set of components to build web UIs out of
ramon156
A customizable component library built on radix.
Not sure why this upsets people, is it because it's popular and therefore bad?
icemelt8
default UI of the internet
razzmataks
[dead]
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