Can I use a theme I created without allowing it to be used by others?

You can override the color scheme with CSS (some detail here: Updating themes and plugins to support automatic dark mode), otherwise you’d need to build a custom plugin to allow you to set a different theme for an admin, as it’s not an existing feature within Discourse.

The idea would be to put the admin CSS in your default theme; unless someone went digging around in your CSS you’d be the only one to see/utilize it.

Another option entirely is to use a browser plugin like stylish to set custom CSS locally.

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