Tangerine Neue for Mastodon
In 2023, Niléane created Tangerine UI, and it is 100% the best UI for Mastodon out there, and honestly, I think it should have been made the default theme by now.
That's why I was sad to hear that she was no longer maintaining the project last week. It can be a lot of time and effort to maintain something like this, so I definitely appreciate the desire to remove the burden of maintaining it from her life.
However, I still use Mastodon on the web, and I didn't want to have the theme start to break in new and interesting ways as new versions of Mastodon came out. I'm on mastodon.social, which is running Mastodon 4.6, which this theme does not support. While it mostly works fine, there are a few little bugs here and there.
Tangerine Neue
I have no idea how much I'm going to do here long term, but Tangerine Neue is my fork of Tangerine UI. Here's what you need to know.
Mastodon 4.6 is the minimum supported Mastodon version. If your instance has not updated to 4.6 yet, you shouldn't adopt this fork yet. Mastodon 4.7 is currently in alpha and everything works so far there as well, and I anticipated working whenever that officially releases.
I've added a new granite theme on top of the four color themes that were there previously. I know this won't beat everyone's taste, but I think it's a slick new option.
Tangerine UI already did a pretty good job with accessibility standards. However, I did make a couple of tweaks to make the default contrast a little stronger. There is also some custom styling for users who have high contrast mode enabled. These high contrast options engage whether you have high contrast set on your device settings or via Mastodon's account settings.
Tangerine UI also did this cool thing where specific keywords in trending hashtags would get custom icons next to them (music note, film, Pride, etc), and I've added a few more keywords to the mix, which should let you see these custom icons a bit more often.
On the development front, which is mostly interesting just to me, I made some changes to the build process in an attempt to reduce duplicated code and avoid any errors across the five different color themes. Instead of maintaining each theme individually, there's now a template file that I can edit and a build process that generates the five variants for each color scheme. The project itself has more code than before, but the code that I actually work on in the project has been reduced by about 80%.
Future plans
As I stated at the top of this blog post, and I try to make clear in the README on GitHub, this project is very modest in nature, and I don't necessarily anticipate being the torchbearer for Tangerine UI going forward. It's a very popular project, so I suspect others will have forks they share as well, and they may do a better job than I can long-term maintaining them.
However, I was making this for myself and figured why not share it with everyone, and if people like it, wonderful!
Again, shout out to Niléane for creating this amazing theme and maintaining it for three years. She's truly one of the GOATs of Mastodon.