Choose your sidebar style
The left navigation rail — the strip with your workspace icons and main navigation — has a style preference you can set for yourself. Atender’s default is the dark ink rail, but you can switch to a lighter rail variant if you prefer a brighter look. This is a personal display preference: it changes how the rail looks only for you, on your own screen. It doesn’t change anything for the rest of your team, and it doesn’t touch your tenant’s brand colors.
Open the screen
Click Settings → Preferences, then go to the Appearance section. It’s under the Personal part of the Settings sidebar, so no tenant-level permission is needed — every user can set this for themselves.
Sidebar style
Under Appearance, you’ll find the sidebar style option with two choices:
- Ink — the default dark rail. This is the standard Atender look: a dark, high-contrast navigation strip.
- Light rail — a lighter variant of the same navigation strip, for users who prefer a brighter interface.
Both options only change the colors of the navigation rail itself. They don’t rearrange navigation items, don’t resize the rail, and don’t affect any other part of the app.
Like other Appearance toggles, your choice saves instantly — there’s no separate Save button to click.
What stays the same
- Tenant brand colors are unaffected. If your organization has a custom brand color set at the tenant level, that stays exactly as configured regardless of which rail style you personally choose.
- Other users aren’t affected. This is a per-user preference. A teammate sitting next to you can be using the ink rail while you use the light rail, with no coordination needed.
- Everything outside the rail is unaffected. Conversation views, settings pages, and the rest of the interface keep their normal appearance — only the left navigation rail’s colors change.
How it interacts with dark mode
Your rail style preference and dark mode work independently of each other. Switching your sidebar style doesn’t turn dark mode on or off, and switching dark mode doesn’t reset your sidebar style choice. Both are color choices, but they apply to different things: dark mode governs the overall app color scheme, while the sidebar style setting governs only the rail’s look within whichever mode you’re in.
Troubleshooting
- Symptom: The rail still looks dark after I chose the light rail. Fix: Refresh the page. Appearance preferences apply immediately in most cases, but a stale page load can occasionally show the previous style until it’s reloaded.
- Symptom: My teammate’s sidebar looks different from mine even though we’re on the same team. Fix: That’s expected — sidebar style is a personal preference, not a team-wide setting. Each user picks their own.