Sharing themes

Every theme (yours or a built-in) can be exported to a single self-contained file, and any .wmtheme.json file can be imported back in, whether it came from a friend, a download, or your own backup. The same file format is also what an addon repository serves, so publishing a theme takes no extra packaging step.

The theme gallery, with export and import actions above the cards.

Exporting a theme

WM Keyboard›Appearance›Keyboard themes

Every card in the gallery has an export icon (a small upload glyph) except the Default (system) card, which has no export option because it isn’t a stored theme: it’s generated live from your device’s Material You color scheme, so there’s nothing fixed to export. Custom themes and every built-in theme can be exported.

Tapping export opens the system “Save as” file picker so you choose the destination and filename yourself; the suggested name is the theme’s own name plus the .wmtheme.json extension, so exporting a theme called “Midnight” suggests Midnight.wmtheme.json. The picker uses the plain application/json MIME type rather than a custom one, deliberately, so file managers and chat apps don’t hide the file from you the way they might hide an unrecognized vendor type.

What a card exports depends on how the gallery is drawing it. A grouped family card exports the whole family, every look in one file. A separate card exports the single look it shows, with the other looks and the group name stripped out, so the person you send it to gets one theme rather than a family with holes in it. Flip Theme gallery style if you want the other one; see Theme families and looks.

The exported file is the theme’s full set of colors, gradients, and radii, written as plain JSON with no wrapper or format tag around it; a theme file identifies itself by its .wmtheme.json extension rather than a marker inside the file, unlike layout or settings exports. If the theme has a background image, the image is read off disk and embedded in the file as base64 rather than left as a reference to a path on your device, so the export is fully self-contained. Opening it on another phone doesn’t require re-picking the photo. A theme with no background image just has empty image fields. There’s no size limit on a local export, so a theme with a large background photo can produce a correspondingly large file.

Importing a theme

There are three ways a theme gets imported, and they don’t all behave the same way: two apply the theme immediately, one doesn’t. A fourth button on the same row, FlorisBoard, reads someone else’s format rather than this one; it’s covered separately below.

From the Import button

WM Keyboard›Appearance›Keyboard themes

The Import button next to Export opens a file picker scoped to JSON-ish files. It’s intentionally permissive about the exact MIME type, since file providers report a .json file as text/plain or application/octet-stream about as often as they get it right. Pick a .wmtheme.json file and it’s added to Your themes under a freshly generated ID. The ID stored inside the file itself is discarded, so importing the same file twice creates two separate custom themes rather than updating one in place. Any embedded background image is written back out to local storage as part of the import.

Importing this way both adds the theme and switches the keyboard to it immediately: there’s no separate confirmation step for “use it now.”

By opening the file elsewhere

Tapping a .wmtheme.json file in a file manager, or choosing “open with” on one from a chat app, hands it to a small confirmation dialog rather than dropping you into the settings app. It asks “Import theme name?” with the note that the theme is added to your themes and applied to the keyboard, then a single Import button. Confirming has the same immediate-apply effect as the in-app Import button: added to Your themes and switched on right away.

Caution

This file association is matched by filename, since a theme file carries no internal tag to identify it: a .wmtheme.json extension is the only signal. If you rename the file and drop that suffix (keeping just .json), Android stops offering WM Keyboard as a handler for it. The in-app Import button above isn’t affected, since it doesn’t check the filename.

Screenshot pending

Opening a theme file from a file manager shows a one-tap import confirmation.

From an addon repository

See Addon repositories for how repositories work generally. Installing a theme from one behaves differently from the two file-based flows above: it’s added to Your themes but not switched on automatically. Browsing a repository shouldn’t repaint your keyboard behind your back, so after the install finishes you get a separate, dismissable prompt: “Installed theme name”, asking “Use it as your keyboard theme now?” with a Switch to it button and a Not now dismiss option. Declining leaves the theme sitting in Your themes, installed but not worn, until you tap it yourself.

A theme listing in a repository also isn’t previewable in the addon browser the way a dictionary or sticker pack is. A theme is judged by seeing the keyboard wearing it, which a static preview panel can’t honestly show. And unlike a plugin, a theme’s checksum in the repository manifest is optional rather than enforced, since a theme isn’t executable code; a theme with no checksum still installs the same as one that has it, with no extra warning either way.

From a FlorisBoard file

The gallery’s third import button reads FlorisBoard’s own .flex theme packages instead of .wmtheme.json, and converts every theme inside one into a custom theme here. You can open a .flex straight from a file manager too. A file that carries both a day and a night version becomes one theme with two looks rather than two entries. What converts cleanly, what gets reported instead of guessed at, and why a FlorisBoard 0.4 theme is refused outright are all in Importing other keyboards.

Publishing a theme

Publishing requires no extra packaging: the exact .wmtheme.json file the Export button produces is what a repository serves. Export the theme, drop the file into your repository’s themes/ folder, and reference it from the repository manifest. See Addon repository format for the manifest shape and a worked theme entry.

Details and edge cases

• No limit on custom themes. Unlike sticker packs or plugins, there’s no cap on how many themes you can import or create.
• Re-importing a file always creates a new theme. Because the ID inside the file is discarded on import, editing a file externally and re-importing it adds another entry rather than replacing the original; delete the old one yourself if you don’t want both.
• Deleting the active theme falls back to Default. If you delete a custom theme that’s currently applied, the keyboard falls back to the Default (system) theme. Deleting a theme from the gallery also removes its background image file(s) from storage.
• Import and export work the same in both editions. There’s no feature gap between the full and lite builds for exporting, importing, or installing themes from a repository.
• A background image travels with every export, portrait and landscape both, so restoring a theme on a new device doesn’t require re-picking either photo. See Image backgrounds for how those images are set in the first place.