Choose approach for base theme

Concerns:

Layout: needs to be clean and easy to use, e.g. using simply sphinx toctrees
Extensions: we need to support MyST notebooks, Sphinx-Design, and maybe more plugins
Dark mode: has gone through 3 eras, both the theme and plugins need to agree for support (ipywidgets sucks at this). This is the perfect approach: Dark mode like it’s 2024 pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme#2484
Color system: colors shared with the website, available as CSS variables. see pydata theme docs about this.

Ideas:

customize PyData theme lightly
customize PyData theme similarly to book theme but being able to fix issues quickly, e.g. fix: don’t show navbar if the user doesn’t ask for it executablebooks/sphinx-book-theme#987
other theme base?

Theme	Pro	Con
PyData	Relatively modern CSS makes customization nice: CSS variables, media queries	Looks wonky, header gets big, unclear what belongs into header and what into sidebar[^1]
Book	Looks good and clean out of the box, otherwise see PyData (it customizes it)	Slow response to isses, we’d customize a customization, so more complex overrides
Other	There might be one that’s perfect?	Most don’t have good notebook/MyST support, might use a dark mode scheme not supported by extensions

sphinx-book-theme doesn’t have a lot over pydata-sphinx-theme (see below)

I think except for the layout (where I prefer the navbar-less book theme one) we can get by via the sphinx.ext.linkcode extension.

Buttons:

Notebook buttons: launch (Binder, JupyterHub, Colab, …), download, fullscreen
Repo buttons: pydata has use_edit_page_button, book theme adds use_repository_button, use_source_button, use_issues_button

Content

use_sidenotes
Full width and margin classes
no-header config with home_page_in_toc, show_navbar_depth, max_navbar_depth, collapse_navbar, toc_title

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