StepMania has had a long history with lots of super cool themes. But as the software has evolved, a lot of older themes are no longer compatible with modern versions of StepMania.
¶ Modern themes
These are themes that work with most modern forks of StepMania (like OutFox, ITGmania, and Stepmania 5.1b2).
¶ Simply Love
Simply Love boasts a distinctly simple aesthetic, competitive-tier visual clarity, and quality-of-life features. It is unquestionably the most popular ITG theme, due to its competitive nature, consistent updates, and customization.
It is included as a default theme in many different ITG simulators, such as NotITG, Club Fantastic, and ITGmania. It has so many bundled features, that many other modern themes are based off of Simply Love. Needless to say, it is highly recommended as a starting point.
¶ Horsey's Fork of Simply Love
Horsey's fork of Simply Love is a fork that aims to only add to the existing Simply Love theme. No features from the mainline theme are removed. But this fork adds a several notable features such as: re-designed ScreenSelectMusic with more player statistics, a clock on home mode, and re-addition of score vocalization.
¶ Sereni's Vertical Simply Love
Sereni's Vertical Simply Love is a fork that adapts the Simply Love theme for use on single player setups with vertical displays.
Main feature of the fork is visually bigger arrow scrolling space. However, you sacrifice Edit mode, Casual mode and some other features.
¶ Zarzob und Zankoku's Fork of Simply Love (zmod)
Simply-Love-zmod is one of the more popular Simply Love forks that adds a lot of aesthetic and QoL options, like comparing scores to ghost data (for both ITG and EX score), support for BoogieStats, 10ms Blue Fantastic window, folder stats on the song wheel, support for folder pass lamps and Quints and much more. This fork requires ITGmania.
¶ Simply Styles
Simply Styles is a project by Blizzrdball that provides more visual styles for Simply Love. These are not standalone themes, but are instead meant to be applied to an existing version of Simply Love or SL-Zmod (might work with other forks of Simply Love, but it's only tested on those two).
¶ Waterfall
Waterfall is a theme developed by SteveReen, originally based off Simply Love, which has a number of new features mostly focused around improving timing/accuracy. Originally developed for ECFA 2021, Waterfall features new "default" timing windows that are stricter than either ITG or DDR (though the "legacy" ITG timing windows are still tracked and shown on the song results screen) and multiple life bars that function similarly to the life bars in the rhythm game "Sound Voltex."
Waterfall Expanded by Zarzob adds more QoL and fun features to Waterfall. Waterfall Expanded last update July 2022.
¶ Digital Dance
Digital Dance is an ongoing Stepmania 5 theme that was originally forked from Simply Love, but is now it's own entity. It's being made by JNero with numerous QoL improvements and streamlining changes.
It includes features such as a custom lua song/course wheel, song search, better sort/sub sort options, song filters, greater depth and control over on-screen information in gameplay (such as Groovestats song records, step statistics in 2-Player mode, and column cues for steps after a player determined break), mouse controls, and many other bonuses. It is compatible with both ECS/SRPG events and ITL, as of the most recent versions of those events.
¶ In The Groove 3 Encore
In The Groove 3 Encore is a revival of the classic fan-made In The Groove 3 theme for Project OutFox.
Although originally a straight port, the theme has come a long way, and now contains many of the quality-of-life features of modern ITG.
¶ In The Groove 2 SM5
In The Groove 2 SM5 is a direct port of the In The Groove 2 arcade theme to StepMania 5.
¶ Simply-ITGmania by beaglebark
Similar to Simply ITG, Simply-ITGmania takes the ITG2 SM5 theme and adds a lot of the enhancements from Simply Love (including the zmod fork). This version adds better scroll speed options, FA+ judgements and score, GrooveStats/BoogieStats support, folder stats and stats, judgement tilt and many other features to the classic In The Groove 2 theme. Due to the drastic difference between the ITG2 and Simply Love theme, there might still be bugs, so please report them on GitHub or to @beaglebark on Discord. This theme, as the name implies, requires ITGmania to work.
¶ Legacy themes
These are themes that work with older forks of StepMania (like OpenITG, StepMania 3.95, and original ITG).
¶ Simply ITG
Simply ITG is a theme for OpenITG and NotITG that attempts to backport modern Simply Love features into the original arcade ITG2 theme.
This theme is great for those that enjoy the quality-of-life tweaks that Simply Love features, but that prefer the aesthetic style of the original arcade game.