Doxygen Awesome is a custom CSS theme for doxygen html-documentation with lots of customization parameters.

Motivation

I really like how the doxygen html-documentation is structured! But IMHO it looks a bit outdated.

This theme is an attemt to update the visuals of doxygen without changing it's overall layout too much.

Features

🌈 Clean, modern design
🚀 Heavily customizable by adjusting CSS-variables
🧩 No changes to the HTML structure of Doxygen required
📱 Improved mobile usability
🌘 Dark mode support!
🥇 Works best with doxygen 1.9.1 or 1.9.2

Installation

Copy the css files from this repository into your project or add this repository as submodule and check out the latest release:

git submodule add https://github.com/jothepro/doxygen-awesome-css.git
cd doxygen-awesome-css
git checkout v1.5.0

Then make the option HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET in your Doxyfile point to the css files:

# Doxyfile
# ...
HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET  = doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome.css

Variants

There is two variants of the theme.

theme variations

Base theme:
# Doxyfile

GENERATE_TREEVIEW = YES # optional. Also works without treeview

HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET = doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome.css
Sidebar-only theme (experimental):
# Doxyfile

GENERATE_TREEVIEW = YES # required!

HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET = doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome.css doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome-sidebar-only.css

Dark Mode Toggle (Experimental)

The theme comes with an experimental feature that adds a button to enable and disable the dark theme variant manually.

It requires customizations in both the header & footer html template.

Create default header & footer templates:
doxygen -w html header.html footer.html delete_me.css
Reference the required resources in your Doxyfile:
# Include the required Javascript

HTML_EXTRA_FILES = doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome-darkmode-toggle.js

# Add the additional CSS. This is ONLY required for the sidebar-only theme variant!

HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET = doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome.css \

doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome-sidebar-only.css \

doxygen-awesome-css/doxygen-awesome-sidebar-only-darkmode-toggle.css

# set custom header & footer files generated in previous step

HTML_HEADER = header.html

HTML_FOOTER = footer.html
In header.html, include doxygen-awesome-darkmode-toggle.js at the end of the <head>:
<html>

<head>



<script type="text/javascript" src="$relpath^doxygen-awesome-darkmode-toggle.js"></script>

</head>

<body>
In footer.html, initialize the doxygen-awesome-dark-mode-toggle element at the end of the <body>:


<script type="text/javascript">

// script for doxygen 1.9.1

$(function() {

$(document).ready(function(){

toggleButton = document.createElement('doxygen-awesome-dark-mode-toggle')

toggleButton.title = "Toggle Light/Dark Mode"

document.getElementById("MSearchBox").parentNode.appendChild(toggleButton)

})

})

</script>

</body>

</html>

Attention: In Doxygen 1.9.2 the searchbox and it's siblings are deleted on every resize, which is why the toggle button has to be re-added every time:
$(function() {

toggleButton = document.createElement('doxygen-awesome-dark-mode-toggle')

toggleButton.title = "Toggle Light/Dark Mode"

$(document).ready(function(){

document.getElementById("MSearchBox").parentNode.appendChild(toggleButton)

})

$(window).resize(function(){

document.getElementById("MSearchBox").parentNode.appendChild(toggleButton)

})

})

Examples

Sidebar-Only theme: Documentation of this repository
Base theme: libsl3

Configuration

CSS Variables

This theme is highly customizable because a lot of things are parameterized with CSS variables. The following list of parameters is not complete! You can easily modify any variable with the developer tools of your browser to find out what it does.

To customize the existing theme, add your own custom.css and overwrite the variables there:

HTML_EXTRA_STYLESHEET = doxygen-awesome-theme/doxygen-awesome.css custom.css

/* custom.css */
html {
    /* define light-mode variable overrides here */
}
 
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    html:not(.light-mode) {
        /* define dark-mode variable overrides here if you DON'T use doxygen-awesome-darkmode-toggle.js */
    }
}
 
html.dark-mode {
    /* define dark-mode variable overrides here if you DO use doxygen-awesome-darkmode-toggle.js */
}

Parameter	Default (Light)	Default (Dark)
Color Scheme: primary theme color. This will affect the entire websites color scheme: links, arrows, labels, ...
`--primary-color`	#1779c4	#1982d2
`--primary-dark-color`	#00559f	#5ca8e2
`--primary-light-color`	#7aabd6	#4779ac
`--primary-lighter-color`	#cae1f1	#191e21
`--primary-lightest-color`	#e9f1f8	#191a1c
Spacing: default spacings. Most ui components reference these values for spacing, to provide uniform spacing on the page.
`--spacing-small`	`5px`
`--spacing-medium`	`10px`
`--spacing-large`	`16px`
Border Radius: border radius for all rounded ui components. Will affect many components, like dropdowns, memitems, codeblocks, ...
`--border-radius-small`	`4px`
`--border-radius-medium`	`6px`
`--border-radius-large`	`8px`
Content Width: The content is centered and constrained in its width. To make the content fill the whole page, set the following variable to `auto`.
`--content-maxwidth`	`1000px`
Code Fragment Colors: Color-Scheme of multiline codeblocks
`--fragment-background`	#282c34
`--fragment-foreground`	#fff
Arrow Opacity: By default the arrows in the sidebar are only visible on hover. You can override this behaviour so they are visible all the time.
`--side-nav-arrow-opacity`	`0`
`--side-nav-arrow-hover-opacity`	`0.9`
Darkmode Toggle Icon: If you have enabled the darkmode toggle button, you can define the icon that is shown for the current mode.
`--darkmode-toggle-button-icon`	☀️	🌛
...and many more

If you miss a configuration option or find a bug, please consider opening an issue!

Doxygen generator

The theme overrides most colors with the --primary-color-* variables.

But there is a few small images and graphics that the theme cannot adjust or replace. To make these blend in better with the rest, it is recommended to adjust the doxygen color settings to something that matches the chosen color-scheme.

For the default color-scheme, these values work out quite well:

# Doxyfile
HTML_COLORSTYLE_HUE    = 209
HTML_COLORSTYLE_SAT    = 255
HTML_COLORSTYLE_GAMMA  = 113

Browser support

Tested with

Chrome 91, Chrome 91 for Android, Chrome 87 for iOS
Safari 14, Safari for iOS 14
Firefox 89, Firefox Daylight 89 for Android, Firefox Daylight 33 for iOS

Tips & Tricks

Class Diagrams with Graphviz

To get the best looking class diagrams for your documentation, generate them with Graphviz as vector graphics with transparent background:

# Doxyfile
HAVE_DOT = YES
DOT_IMAGE_FORMAT = svg
DOT_TRANSPARENT = YES

Share your own theme customizations

If you customized the theme with custom colors, spacings, font-sizes, etc. and you want to share your creation with others, you can to this here.

I am always curious to learn about how you made the theme look even better!

Credits

This theme is heavily inspired by the beautiful vuepress static site generator default theme!