Riverbed

A theme for FreshRSS that treats reading as the point.

FreshRSS is where your feeds live. Riverbed is what makes sitting down with them feel less like clearing an inbox and more like reading. The timeline stays quiet so you can triage fast. Open an article and the page is set like a book — one serif column, a comfortable width, a comfortable size — so you actually read it.

Made for daily reading in English and Chinese, on the desktop and the phone, in light and dark.

Timeline — light

Timeline — dark

Article view

What changes

• The article reads like a page, not a feed. Body text is set in a serif (Newsreader) at a book-like size on a measured column, so long pieces stop feeling like a wall of screen.
• A calm timeline. Quiet chrome, monochrome icons, unread shown by a dot and a little weight instead of loud color. Your eye lands on the writing, not the UI.
• Dark mode that follows you. It rides FreshRSS's own dark-mode setting and your system preference — warm white by day, near-black at night. Nothing extra to toggle.
• Chinese and English sit well together. Mixed 中文 and English text gets the small breathing space it needs, and Chinese renders in your system's serif with no loading delay.
• Built for the phone too. Big touch targets, safe-area padding, and the swipe gestures you already use (works with the TouchControl extension).
• Easy on the eyes, on purpose. Every text-on-background pair meets WCAG AA contrast in both light and dark, and animation respects "reduce motion."

Install

You already run FreshRSS, so this is one clone and one command. The theme is the Riverbed/ folder in this repo; deploy.sh copies it into place.

git clone https://github.com/wilbeibi/freshrss-riverbed.git
cd freshrss-riverbed
DEST=/path/to/FreshRSS/p/themes/Riverbed ./deploy.sh

Then pick Riverbed in Settings → Display → Theme.

Docker / Podman. The image's p/themes/ isn't persisted, so bind-mount a host directory read-only and point DEST at it:

Volume=/host/freshrss/themes/Riverbed:/var/www/FreshRSS/p/themes/Riverbed:ro

Restart the container once, then DEST=/host/freshrss/themes/Riverbed ./deploy.sh. Later CSS updates need no restart.

No shell? Copy the Riverbed/ folder into p/themes/ directly. It works — just hard-refresh once after a future update to clear the browser cache.

Recommended settings

• Automatic dark mode: Auto
• Content width: Medium (the ideal reading measure; pick Thin if you read mostly Chinese)
• Website: Icon and name

Good to know

• FreshRSS's dark mode has two states: follow the system (Auto) or force light (No). There's no "always dark while my system is light" — set your system or browser to dark for that.
• Login and registration pages use the default user's theme, so they only show Riverbed once the default user has selected it.
• FreshRSS updates can move things under the hood. Riverbed fails soft: anything it hasn't styled falls back to plain FreshRSS, never a broken page.

Under the hood

For the curious, or anyone extending it: the design rationale — color tokens, type scale, the CJK-aware typesetting — lives in DESIGN.md.

deploy.sh bundles the theme's source partials into a single riverbed.css because FreshRSS serves theme assets with a 30-day cache and only busts the one metadata-listed file; bundling makes every update land right away.

Licensing

Theme CSS: MIT. Bundled fonts: Inter (© The Inter Project Authors) and Newsreader (© The Newsreader Project Authors), both SIL OFL 1.1 — see Riverbed/fonts/OFL.txt.