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Try alternative Sphinx themes for the PyGMT documentation? #4745
Description
The PyGMT documentation has used the Sphinx RTD theme since its first commit. It has worked well, and its relatively infrequent releases (xref: https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/tags) can be viewed as a good thing (stable behavior and little maintenance burden) or a bad thing (missing documentation features).
It may be worth experimenting with alternative themes from the Sphinx Themes gallery. One popular option is the PyData Sphinx Theme, which is used by NumPy, pandas, xarray, and other projects in the PyData ecosystem. It offers a more flexible layout, light/dark mode, and configurable navigation.
I'm not proposing that we replace the current theme. Instead, this issue invites anyone interested to try an alternative in a small proof-of-concept PR and share a documentation preview or screenshots. We can then discuss whether a theme change would be worthwhile.
Activity
yvonnefroehlich commentedon Jul 29, 2026
I like using the Sphinx RTD theme for the PyGMT documentation as this makes the docuementation consistent to the GMT documentation, which uses the same theme.
The possibility to change between light/dark modes is a nice thing. Maybe we could then also use both the light and dark versions of the PyGMT logo on the landing page.