Customize Brewser

Almost everything the Brewser shell shows you — the wallpaper behind the home page, the colours and fonts, the browser toolbar, the mouse cursors and the on-screen keyboard — is driven by plain files on your SD card. There's no rebuild, no toolchain, and no code to compile: drop in an image, edit a CSS file, or add one line to a JSON list, and the change shows up the next time you launch.

This section is a breakdown of what you can change and how.

The themes folder

On first launch Brewser copies its built-in look to your SD card. From then on it reads everything from there, so this folder is the one place you customise:

sdmc:/switch/brewser/themes/
├── backgrounds.json     ← list of selectable wallpapers
├── backgrounds/         ← wallpaper images (.png/.jpg) and shaders (.frag)
├── styles.json          ← list of selectable page styles
├── styles/              ← the CSS files
├── toolbars.json        ← list of selectable toolbars
├── toolbars/            ← the toolbar HTML files
├── keyboards.json       ← list of selectable on-screen keyboards
├── keyboards/           ← the keyboard HTML files
├── cursors.json         ← maps each cursor shape to an image
├── cursors/             ← the cursor images (.png/.apng)
└── assets/              ← toolbar icons, the shell music track, etc.

Each of the five categories works the same way: a *.json file is a list of choices, and each choice points at a file (a CSS file, an HTML file, an image or a shader). To add your own, drop the file in the matching subfolder and add an entry to the list.

Editing the files. Power the console off, put the SD card in your computer, and edit the files in switch/brewser/themes/ with any text editor or image tool. If you run an on-device FTP/file-manager homebrew you can edit them in place instead.

Choosing a theme

You don't have to touch anything to switch between the looks that ship with Brewser — open Settings in the shell and use the pickers:

Your choices are saved to sdmc:/switch/brewser/configs/config.json. If you prefer to edit that file directly, the keys are brewserStyle, toolbar and keyboard (each is the path of the entry you want, e.g. themes/styles/dark.css) and themeBackground (the title of the background entry, e.g. Aurora). There is no cursor picker — cursors are configured by editing cursors.json (see Cursors).

What you can change

• Backgrounds & shaders — static wallpapers, and animated wallpapers you write as a WebGL fragment shader.
• Styles — the CSS that colours and lays out the shell's own pages.
• Toolbars — the HTML for the browser chrome (back/forward/home/URL bar), including where it sits and how tall it is.
• Cursors — the images used for each mouse cursor shape, with hotspots.
• On-screen keyboards — the HTML for the keyboard overlay used for text entry.

Before you dive in

Two things worth knowing up front:

Your edits survive normal reboots, but not Brewser updates. The themes/ folder is owned by the app: when you install a new version of Brewser, the shipped theme files and the five *.json lists are re-written to their defaults. Normal power-cycles never touch them. So keep a backup of any files you change and any lines you add to the JSON lists, and re-apply them after updating. A brand-new file whose name isn't one Brewser ships (e.g. styles/my-theme.css) is left alone on update — but the entry you added to styles.json to point at it will be reset, so you'll need to add that line back.

A broken entry just gets skipped. If a JSON file is malformed or an entry points at a file that isn't there, that choice is quietly dropped from the picker rather than crashing the shell — so a typo can't lock you out. If a choice disappears from Settings, check the JSON and the file path.

Ready? Start with Backgrounds & shaders — the most fun place to begin.