Why I Built a Ghost Theme With Three Display Modes

I drive at night. Always have. Less traffic, quieter, just you and the road. That's what I wanted from a Ghost theme—something clean that doesn't get in the way.

I didn't build Nightdriver for anyone else. I built it because I needed it. I wanted a theme I could tweak without opening the code editor every time I felt like changing a color.

Ghost gives you 20 custom settings slots in the theme customizer. I used all of them. Backgrounds, text colors, borders—you can adjust the entire Nightdriver mode from the admin panel. No code required.

There are three modes because that's what made sense. Day mode for regular browsing. Night mode for reading in the dark. Nightdriver mode sits in between and you can make it look however you want.

The utility bar hides when you scroll down and comes back when you scroll up. If that annoys you, long-press the center handle to lock it in place. Long-press again to unlock it.

There's a reading progress bar at the top of posts. You can customize the color and height or turn it off completely if you don't like it.

The homepage has what I'm calling the Drift Zone—a bento-style layout with rotating author cards, tags, and some CTAs. I embedded Inter and JetBrains Mono so there are no external font requests.

This is version 1.0.0. It's not perfect. I rushed through a lot of it to get my own site running. There's a list of things I want to add—picture gallery, product page templates, more layout options. I'll get to them.

The theme goes on GitHub in the next few days under Apache 2.0. You can fork it, use it, modify it, whatever. I'm also submitting it to the Ghost Marketplace after that.

This post is a snapshot from 7 February 2026. Ongoing updates, releases, and progress are documented on the Nightdriver page.

Build updates are published here as work continues.
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—Jay