Screen Templating

TRMNL's native design system for developing beautiful, e-ink friendly screens.

Overview

The TRMNL device is an 800x480 pixel, black and white, 1-bit grayscale display. This means we had to abandon a lot of modern web styling techniques when developing the API. Learn more about this process here.

For the latest documentation on building beautiful plugins with TRMNL, see our Framework docs:

https://usetrmnl.com/framework

Quickstart (TRMNL account)

The easiest way to start building with TRMNL is by making a Private Plugin from inside your account. This includes an inline editor, merge variable interpolation, and a live previewer.

Quickstart (no TRMNL account)

Create an HTML file with our plugins CSS + JS embedded in the <head>.

The example below has simple markup for a "full" layout plugin. We also offer half vertical, half horizontal, and quadrant sized layouts.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://usetrmnl.com/css/latest/plugins.css">
    <script src="https://usetrmnl.com/js/latest/plugins.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body class="environment trmnl">
    <div class="screen">
      <div class="view view--full">
        <div class="layout">
          <div class="columns">
            <div class="column">
              <div class="markdown">
                <span class="title">Motivational Quote</span>
                <div class="content content--center">“I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday.”</div>
                <span class="label label--underline">Michael Scott</span>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
        
        <div class="title_bar">
          <img class="image" src="https://usetrmnl.com/images/plugins/trmnl--render.svg" />
          <span class="title">Plugin Title</span>
          <span class="instance">Instance Title</span>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

The above markup should produce a screen like this:

Note: in some cases you may need to include the 'Inter' font (inside the <head>) to achieve the same look and feel as TRMNL's in-browser markup editor described above:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:wght@300;350;375;400;450;600;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Customize and make it dynamic

Use our Framework Docs to enhance your design and show/hide logic (example: overflow management, number formatting).

When you're satisfied with the design, replace dynamic content with {{ variable }} references. TRMNL uses the Liquid templating library by Shopify to interpolate values into your template markup. You can then save

Tutorial - How to create a custom plugin

Note: You may also leverage Liquid Filters to reduce the sanitization required by the service producing data for your TRMNL plugins. For example, you can convert "10" to "$10.00" via money_with_currency.

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Last updated 4 months ago