Paper & Honey
A warm theme for Thunderbird. Cream paper, brown ink, honey accents.
Thunderbird, but a small reward to open.
Thunderbird is the right mail client: open, local, yours. It is also so ugly, and most themes only recolour the toolbar. Paper & Honey themes the whole window.
What changes
- Cream paper and brown ink in light mode. Espresso in dark.
- A calm two-line message list. Unread is darker ink, never bolder, so rows don’t jump as you read.
- A selection you can actually read, in every state.
- Rounded icons, with folders coloured by what they hold.
- Plain-text mail set in Charter with room to breathe. Newsletters keep their own design.
- The subject of each message as a headline.
- No bold, no stacked padding, sentence case wherever a theme can reach.
Install
Download both files:
- Paper & Honey 0.4.0, the theme
- Paper & Honey Reading 0.4.0, typography for message bodies and the compose window
In Thunderbird, open Add-ons and Themes, choose the gear menu, then Install Add-on From File, and pick each file. Updates arrive on their own after that.
Needs Thunderbird 151 or later. The type is tuned for the fonts that come with macOS; elsewhere it falls back gracefully. See the release page for notes.
Make the most of it
A few built-in Thunderbird settings finish the look:
- Two-line message cards, from the display options button above the message list.
- Compact density, under View.
- A compact message header: on any message, More, then Customize. Turn off the full address and the labels.
- Favorite folders above all folders, from the folder pane menu.
What it doesn’t do
Thunderbird never themes the summary you see when you select a whole thread, its own themes included, so that view stays plain. Settings pages aren’t themed yet. On a Mac, right-click menus are system menus and follow macOS.
Free to use, with credit
Paper & Honey is free under CC BY 4.0. Share it, change it, build on it. Credit “Paper & Honey” by Paul Welty, with a link back here. The source is on GitHub. Icons by Phosphor.
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