Yazi flavors: a catalogue of community themes for the Yazi file manager
Some Yazi flavors maintained by community.
At a glance
- What is it?
- The yazi-rs flavors repository is a directory of Yazi colour themes, four of which are hosted in the repository itself and several dozen more of which are links to their own upstream repos. It also carries the one warning that matters when picking a theme: check that a flavor matches your Yazi version before you install it.
- Who is it for?
- Adopt the flavors catalogue if you use Yazi and want a curated shortlist of community themes instead of hunting for one yourself, and pick one of the four flavors hosted in the repository itself if you would rather not depend on a third party project staying online. Do not adopt a flavor without checking the version compatibility note, because a theme written for a different Yazi release is the most common reason a theme appears not to work.
- Can I use it commercially?
- Yes. MIT is a permissive licence: you can use, modify and sell software built on it, as long as you keep its copyright and licence notices.
- Is it still maintained?
- Yes. The repository last received commits 24 days ago.
- What is it written in?
- Mainly JavaScript, according to GitHub's language statistics.
Answers come from the project's GitHub data, last synced on October 23, 2026, and from our analysis. They are not legal advice.
Editorial analysis
What a flavor is, and where the format came from
The word that matters here is flavor, and the project defines it precisely. A flavor is a pre-made Yazi theme, introduced in Yazi v0.2.4, allowing users to update and expand their color schemes more conveniently.
The date and version in that sentence are the important part. The flavor format did not exist for the first years of Yazi, so themes written before v0.2.4 use an older mechanism, and a theme written for a later release may use features a given Yazi build does not have. That is exactly the compatibility problem the repository flags in an important callout: check if a flavor is compatible with your version of Yazi before using it, with a link to a section of the documentation titled Why is my flavor/theme not working?
Most readers will recognise the theme names on offer. Dracula, Catppuccin in four flavours, Tokyo Night, Kanagawa in several variants, Gruvbox in several variants, Ayu, Everforest, Nord, Rose Pine in three, Monokai, Flexoki, Synthwave 84, and more. These are established colour schemes that most people have already seen in a terminal, an editor or a code theme, and the flavour format lets them be reused for the file manager.
The catalogue lives in the yazi-rs organisation, and the homepage is yazi-rs.github.io, with the full flavour documentation at yazi-rs.github.io/docs/flavors/overview. The last push to the repository was on 2026-09-29 and the licence is MIT.
The repository is not archived, and there are no GitHub releases, which is what you would expect for something that is a list of links more than a shippable artifact.
Four themes live in the repository, the rest are links elsewhere
The top level of the repository makes the split obvious. There are four directories, dracula.yazi, catppuccin-frappe.yazi, catppuccin-latte.yazi, catppuccin-macchiato.yazi and catppuccin-mocha.yazi, and those are the themes that are actually present in this repository.
Everything else in the README is a link to a separate project. Tokyo Night, Kanagawa, Kanagawa Dragon, Kanagawa Lotus, Kanagawa Paper, Gruvbox in its three variants, Ayu Dark, Everforest Medium, Ashen, Flexoki Dark and Light, the three Rose Pine variants, Neon, Nord, Synthwave 84, the two Bluloco variants, Monokai, Eldritch, Modus, the two Obsidian glow variants, Lain, Claude inspired, Thinkpad red OLED, and the Aurora Dawn, Aurora Storm and Dimidium entries all point at their own GitHub repositories.
This arrangement is the substance of the project, and it is worth being clear about what it means. The repository is a directory with a preview image and a link per theme. It is a shopping list, not a bundle. Installing a linked theme means fetching that project's own release, and keeping it updated means tracking that project's repository, not this one.
The hosted four are the exception and they carry their preview images locally, with the img src pointing at a path inside the repository rather than a raw URL on someone else's account. For a reader, that makes those four the low friction option, since the theme and its preview both come from the same place.
One entry breaks the pattern in a useful way. base16.yazi is described in the README as a flavor which uses terminal colors, so it works with any terminal theme, and it has no preview image at all, which is consistent with a theme that inherits rather than specifies its palette.
How the catalogue is organised, and the tooling around it
The README is a plain list with a heading per theme, a link, and a preview image. The one structural variation is at the top, where the first four entries link to directories inside the repository and the rest link out.
The preview images are hosted as raw files on GitHub, mostly from the main branch of each theme project, with a few pointing at refs/heads/main paths or at a specific directory inside a larger repository. The Obsidian glow entry shows the other pattern, where one line links two related themes, obsidian-glow and obsidian-soft-glow, under a single preview.
Around the list there is a small amount of tooling. The top level includes a scripts directory, a themes.md file, a cspell.json, a pnpm-lock.yaml and a package.json. The package.json is minimal:
{
"type": "module"
}The only setting is that the package is an ES module, which tells you the scripts in the scripts directory are JavaScript modules rather than CommonJS. The pnpm-lock.yaml confirms pnpm as the package manager for that tooling, and cspell.json is a spell checker configuration, which fits a repository whose entire content is prose plus a long list of names and URLs.
The themes.md file sits alongside the README, and given the name it most likely holds the theme list in a form the scripts can consume, which would let the README and the listing stay in step. The repository does not document the scripts in the README itself, so if you want to contribute a theme, the file that will generate or check the listing is worth reading before you open a pull request.
The contribution route is stated plainly. If you have created a flavor for Yazi, please raise a PR to add your repo to the README.md. That is a request for a pull request against the README, not a request to move the theme into this repository, which is consistent with the hosted-versus-linked split.
What the catalogue does not tell you
There is a limit to what a list of links can convey, and the gaps are worth naming before you pick a theme.
The first is version compatibility, and the project handles it by warning you rather than by solving it. The README tells you to check compatibility with your version of Yazi and points at the documentation for the reason a theme might not work. It does not publish a compatibility matrix, so the check happens on the documentation side and then in practice. The practical symptom of getting it wrong is that some colours in the theme do not appear, which is easy to misread as a broken install.
The second is that preview images are not specifications. A preview shows one terminal, one set of file types and one background. A theme that looks right in the image may still conflict with your own terminal palette, and several of the listed themes are ports of a scheme designed for a different surface, so the result in the file manager is an approximation of the original rather than the original.
The third is that the catalogue says nothing about how any of these themes are built, how many colours they define, or whether they cover every file type Yazi can display. You get the name and the picture. Whether a theme handles previews, archives, images, git status colouring and the rest of the interface is something you find out by installing it.
The fourth is maintenance. A linked theme can stop being developed, and the link in the README will keep pointing at it regardless. The last push to this repository on 2026-09-29 tells you when the list was last touched, not when any individual theme was last updated.
Choosing between the hosted flavors and the linked ones
The practical decision is between two sources, and the trade-offs are different from what you might expect.
The four hosted flavors, Dracula and the four Catppuccin variants, are complete in one place. You clone or download this repository, you have the theme files, and the preview image next to them is guaranteed to match the files you got, because both are in the same tree. For a user who wants a theme that works and does not want to think about where a third party project is hosted, that is the simple option.
The linked flavors are the opposite trade. You get a much wider selection, including the hardware and ecosystem specific entries such as the Thinkpad red OLED variant, and each theme comes from the project that actually maintains it, so updates arrive when that project decides to make them. The cost is that you now depend on a repository you did not choose, whose maintainer may rename things or disappear.
There is a third consideration that pushes toward the hosted set for a first-time user. The Catppuccin family appears in four variants, mocha, latte, frappe and macchiato, and all four are hosted here. If you like the Catppuccin palette, you can pick the variant that matches your taste without leaving this repository, which is a better experience than assembling the set from four separate links.
If you want a theme that follows your terminal rather than imposing colours, base16 is the one to look at first, because it is built on the assumption that the terminal already defines the palette and the theme simply refers to it. That design makes it the most portable entry in the list and the least likely to clash with an existing setup.
Editorial conclusion
Adopt the flavors catalogue if you use Yazi and want a curated shortlist of community themes instead of hunting for one yourself, and pick one of the four flavors hosted in the repository itself if you would rather not depend on a third party project staying online. Do not adopt a flavor without checking the version compatibility note, because a theme written for a different Yazi release is the most common reason a theme appears not to work. Before you install, read the linked overview documentation, and treat the preview images in the README as an indication of appearance rather than a guarantee that the palette matches the upstream project of the same name.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Yazi flavor?
A flavor is a pre-made Yazi theme, introduced in Yazi v0.2.4, so users can update and expand their color schemes more conveniently. The format documentation is at yazi-rs.github.io/docs/flavors/overview.
Why is my Yazi flavor or theme not working?
The repository warns that you should check if a flavor is compatible with your version of Yazi before using it, and links to the section of the documentation titled Why is my flavor/theme not working? A theme written for a different Yazi release may not apply all of its colours.
Which Yazi flavors are hosted inside the flavors repository?
Four: dracula.yazi, catppuccin-mocha.yazi, catppuccin-latte.yazi, catppuccin-frappe.yazi and catppuccin-macchiato.yazi. Every other entry in the README, including Tokyo Night, Nord, Gruvbox and Rose Pine, is a link to its own separate repository.
How do I add my own Yazi flavor to the catalogue?
Raise a pull request against the README.md to add your repository to the list. The request is for a link to your own repo rather than a move of the theme into this repository.
Which flavor in the Yazi flavors list works with any terminal theme?
base16.yazi, which the README describes as a flavor which uses terminal colors, so it works with any terminal theme. It is the only entry listed without a preview image.
Official sources
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