The theme editor

Merchants can access the theme editor in the Shopify admin.

1. From the Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.
2. Find the theme that you want to edit, and then click Customize.

To understand how your theme settings appear to merchants, you can preview your theme in the theme editor. You can access the theme editor during development by using the following methods:

• Run your theme as a development theme or push your theme to a store using Shopify CLI
• Connect a GitHub branch to your store using the Shopify GitHub integration
• Upload your theme changes to Shopify using Theme Kit
• Upload your theme as a ZIP to a Shopify store

You should choose the preview method that makes the most sense for your current development process.

The settings that a merchant can access in the theme editor are controlled by the theme. Settings can be specified in the following places:

• The theme's config/settings_schema.json file
• The setting attributes for each section that's included in the theme.

When a merchant configures these settings using the theme editor, their configurations are saved. Learn more about theme settings, and the types of settings that you can add to your theme.

The theme editor can preview certain input settings as merchants interact with them, instead of refreshing the entire storefront preview after the merchant makes a selection.

The following input setting categories support live preview:

• Color settings
• Text settings

The theme editor can show a live preview of input settings that return a color object, including color and color_background.

To allow the theme editor to preview color setting changes live, reference the setting in a {% style %} tag in a Liquid template, a section, or a snippet. You can reference the color object directly, or the one of the following properties of the object:

• red
• green
• blue
• rgb

The theme editor can’t provide a live preview for color settings in the following cases:

• Filtered settings: The theme editor can’t provide a live preview for color settings that have Liquid filters applied. For example, {{ settings.colors_accent_2.rgb | replace ‘ ‘, ‘,’ }} can’t be previewed live.

• Stylesheets: The theme editor can’t provide a live preview for color settings that are referenced in stylesheets that are stored in the /assets directory of a theme. Instead, we recommend declaring a CSS variable in your theme.liquid layout file and referencing it in your theme’s CSS files.

  Refer to theme.liquid and base.css in Dawn for an example implementation.

The theme editor can show a live preview of plain or rich text settings. This includes the following settings:

• text
• textarea
• inline_richtext
• richtext

To allow the theme editor to preview text settings live, the code where the setting is referenced must meet the following criteria:

• The setting value must be the only child of its parent HTML element:

• There must be no Liquid filters applied to the setting value, other than the escape filter:

• The setting must not be preceded by, followed by, or wrapped by other Liquid markup inside of the parent HTML element:

• The element must not be hidden when the page loads:

You need to make sure that your theme behaves in the editor the same way it would in the storefront. In some cases, you need to adjust your theme's behavior when it's being previewed in the theme editor to give merchants this experience.

To make your theme context-aware, you need to integrate with the theme editor.

Integrating with the theme editor allows you to do the following:

• Disable any code that should be run only when the theme is viewed by a customer
• Enable or disable any code that should be run only when the theme is being edited
• Make sure that any necessary code is run or cleaned up when a section is added, removed, customized, or moved

The request.design_mode global variable can be used in your theme's Liquid files to detect whether the storefront is being viewed in the theme editor. The value of the variable is set to true when viewing the theme editor. Otherwise, it's set to false.

The Shopify.designMode global variable can be used in your theme's JavaScript files to detect whether the storefront is being viewed in the theme editor. The value of the variable is set to true when viewing the theme editor. Otherwise, it's set to undefined.

When a merchant interacts with a section or block in the theme editor, or activates or deactivates the theme editor preview inspector, the theme editor emits JavaScript events. To learn about the actions that your code should take to account for these events, refer to Integrate sections with the theme editor.