Theme and defaults

Appearance covers the theme — System, Light or Dark, where System follows your device — an accent colour, a body font chosen from a curated list or anything on Google Fonts, and what a plain scroll wheel does. Card defaults set what new notes, docs and shapes start as, and whether clusters open as a canvas or a list. Appearance is personal and follows your account between devices; card defaults belong to the workspace.

Updated August 26, 2026

Appearance

Settings → Appearance. Personal — these change how Clusters looks and behaves for you, on every device you sign in on, and nobody else in the workspace sees them. Three sections.

Theme

• Mode — System, Light or Dark. System follows your device's own setting and changes live when it does; it is what you get until you pick one of the other two, and you can always come back to it. ⌘K → "toggle theme" flips between light and dark without opening settings, which counts as picking one.
• Accent — the highlight colour used through the interface.
• Body font — a curated list of around twenty-five families, plus anything available on Google Fonts.

Theme is stored on your account, not the browser, so it follows you to any device you sign in on. Fonts you have used recently are pre-loaded so text does not flash in a fallback face on a cold load.

Readability across themes

Text colour in notes and documents is resolved against the background it actually sits on. A note authored in light mode stays readable to a collaborator working in dark mode, and to anyone opening a public link.

The reserved accent

The gold accent means active, selected or focused. It is reserved for the interface and is not part of the content palette — so "this is selected" never gets confused with "this is gold" on a colourful board.

Layout

• Clean mode (⌘.) — hides interface chrome for presenting or screenshots
• Sidebar open by default — ⌘B and the collapse chevron write this same preference, so where you left the sidebar is where it is on your next device

Canvas

• Scroll wheel — Pan (the default: ⌘-scroll zooms) or Zoom (a plain scroll zooms at the pointer; ⌘, Alt or Shift pans)

The wheel setting exists because the convention genuinely splits across the tools people arrive from — PureRef and Miro zoom on scroll, Figma and Milanote pan — so there is no default that is right for everyone. It follows your account like the rest of this tab, and pinching a trackpad zooms either way.

Card defaults

Settings → Card defaults. What new cards start as, so you are not restyling every one. Existing cards are never changed.

Unlike Appearance, these belong to the workspace, not to you — so a workspace can have a consistent look without anyone enforcing it by hand. Editors and owners can change them; viewers see them read-only.

Custom fonts

Beyond the curated list, any Google Fonts family can be added and is then available everywhere a font is chosen — notes, documents, shapes and the body font.

Screenplays are the exception: they are always Courier, because the format requires it and page count depends on it.

Machine-readable: /docs/account/theme-and-defaults.md · /llms.txt
What changed and when: /changelog