Apply the Dracula Theme to Quarto Websites

I am something of a Dracula theme fanatic. After first discovering the open-source theme in RStudio, I had to see if it was supported by other applications. To my delight, I found custom Dracula themes for over 400 applications. Applying these themes to my OS, IDEs, browsers, and other applications is now the first thing I do when I install a new tool or set up a computer. I’ve even gone so far as to get Dracula keycaps for my mechanical keyboard.

When I decided to add dark mode to my Quarto website, Dracula was the obvious choice. But, given the wide-ranging support for the theme, I was surprised to discover there was no pre-packaged Bootstrap theme which I could plug into Quarto. Of course, I wasn’t going to let that stop me!

Starting with the Darkly theme from Bootswatch as a base, I customised the theme to incorporate the Dracula palette using the handy Bootstrap Live Customizer tool, before exporting the resulting LESS code and converting it to the SCSS required by Quarto. I had to remove a few variables which seemed to cause issues when rendering. After a few additional tweaks, I was left with a Dracula themed sight that felt like home. You can access the SCSS file here. If you’re reading this post through an aggregator, you can see it in action on my original post.

There are a few things to consider when adding the Dracula theme to your own Quarto site. Not all viewers prefer the dark mode experience, so I prefer to let the user decide. In the snippet from my site-wide YAML configuration below, the user is offered a choice between a light and dark mode (Darkly + Dracula), but the website defaults to the user’s system preference. I also specified a custom to be used across both themes, as I wanted to minimize changes besides colour when switching between themes. As a final touch, specify Dracula code highlighting if you are going to be including code chunks. You may optionally include a styles.css file in the root directory of the project,
incorporating other style changes that are applied across both themes.

---
format:
  html:
    respect-user-color-scheme: true
    theme: 
      dark: [darkly, styles-dark.scss]
      light: sandstone
    header-includes: |
      <link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="https:/s.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Sans" type="text/css"/>
      <link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="https:/s.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Code" type="text/css"/>
    main: "Fira Sans"
    mono: "Fira Code"
highlight-style: Dracula
---

Hopefully this will be of use to some other Dracula diehards out there. I’m sure I will continue to tweak the SCSS file as I spot opportunities for improvement.