Ember — a NetNewsWire theme

A warm, editorial theme for NetNewsWire using Apple system fonts with a vermilion accent, big headline type, a drop cap, serif-italic captions, and full-bleed images. Designed for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, with first-class light and dark modes.

→ ember.marquard.org

Install

One click. On your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, open ember.marquard.org and tap Install in NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire opens and offers to add Ember.

The install button uses NetNewsWire's netnewswire://theme/add URL scheme. GitHub strips custom-scheme links from rendered Markdown, so the working button lives on the site rather than in this README.

Manually. Download the latest Ember.nnwtheme.zip:

• macOS — unzip and double-click Ember.nnwtheme; confirm the install.
• iOS / iPadOS — open the .zip and share it to NetNewsWire.

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

Features

• Apple system fonts (SF Pro) throughout — nothing to download, crisp at every size.
• Warm vermilion accent that shifts to a lighter coral in dark mode for legibility.
• Drop cap on the opening paragraph and a confident headline scale.
• Flagged section headings — a short accent bar marks each <h2>/<h3>.
• 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.
• Podcasts, video, and photos — an article's enclosures get a design of their own: audio as a card with the episode's title, length, and size; video players and episode artwork leading the article; attached photos as a gallery after it.
• Broader footnote support with native-style popovers for common Markdown, Substack, and WordPress footnote formats.
• Designed light and dark — both grounds are warm, not a naive inversion.
• 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.

Enclosures (podcast audio, video, and attached images) need a NetNewsWire release with enclosure support, which is on NetNewsWire's development branch as of October 2026. Earlier releases don't show enclosures at all, and Ember reads as before there. Placing players and artwork above the article, and splitting the audio card's title from its details, also take Article JavaScript; without it, enclosures follow the article.

Ember's additional footnote formats require NetNewsWire's Article JavaScript setting, which is enabled by default. If it is disabled, Ember still renders normally, but only the footnote formats recognized directly by that NetNewsWire version receive interactive 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).

Ember.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)

The docs/ folder is the project site served via GitHub Pages.

Developing & testing

Ember 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 additionally 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 orientation lives in AGENTS.md.

npx nnw-theme@2 picks up new 2.x tooling releases on its own; there is nothing to update in this repository.

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, v2.3).

The workflow checks the theme, refuses a reused tag or a version that did not increase, attaches Ember.nnwtheme.zip, and writes the release notes from the commits since the last tag with git-cliff. The install links always point at releases/latest, so they pick up the newest release automatically.

License

Apache License 2.0 © 2026 Dave Marquard.