emacs-alect-themes

About

Alect is a package that provides (rather low contrast but colourful enough) light and dark color themes for Emacs 24 or later. I use it only with GUI, so colors in terminal may look not very nice.

You can open colors file (in Emacs) to get an idea about the color palettes.

History

At first i had only a light theme – it was just a set of customized faces. Then i realized that at night it's better for eyes to use a dark theme (it was derived from zenburn-theme initially, but then the colors were modified a lot). The idea of creating two themes with different colors and the same code base came from solarized-theme. The code of solarized and zenburn themes was used hardly. Many thanks to their authors.

Installation

Manual

Add this to your init file (~/.emacs.d/init.el or ~/.emacs):

(add-to-list 'load-path              "/path/to/alect-themes")
(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "/path/to/alect-themes")

MELPA

The package can be installed from MELPA. (with M-x package-install or M-x list-packages).

If you want to enable (see Usage section) any theme installed with a package system on Emacs start, you should know the following: Emacs loads packages after processing the init file, so loading a theme will fail because the path to a theme is not known yet. That's why you need to initialize the package system before loading the theme:

(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)
(package-initialize)
...
(load-theme ...)

For further details, see (info "(emacs) Package Installation").

Usage

To activate a theme interactively use customize-themes or load-theme:

M-x load-theme RET alect-light

To load a theme on Emacs start, add this to your init file:

(load-theme 'alect-light t)

Configuration

All color values for the themes are stored in alect-colors variable. You can change this variable by customizing it or you may use alect-generate-colors function (see how the variable is defined in the code).

However those methods redefine the whole variable, so if the palette will be changed in future (it happens sometimes) or a new theme will be added (it's planned), you may not notice that. So you can use another approach if you want to modify only some colors.

Let's say you don't like cursor color for the light theme and red-2 color (it is used for font-lock-string-face, and you strongly believe that «strings should not be red!!») for both themes. You can change those colors by putting this into your .emacs:

(eval-after-load 'alect-themes
  '(progn
     (alect-set-color 'light 'cursor "black")
     (alect-set-color 'light 'red-2 "#126512")
     (alect-set-color 'dark 'red-2 "#32cd32")))

Alternative themes

Along with 2 original light and dark themes, the package provides 2 inverted (alternative) themes. They use the same color palettes, so they look very similar to the original ones. The difference (by default) is that dark and bright colors are reversed.

However these 2 themes can be configured with alect-inverted-color-regexp variable (for details, see docstrings of this variable and alect-get-color function). For example, if you set this variable to invert background colors, alternative themes will look... unusual – see alternative screenshots.

Emacs 24.3.1 and earlier

While using any theme (not only from this package) you may meet faces that do not look how they should (intended by the theme). For example, if you enable alect-light theme, you can see ugly gray buttons (the left picture) in the Custom-mode instead of the themed colored buttons (the right picture):

This happens because Emacs applies default face settings even for a themed face. This behaviour is changed in new versions of Emacs (24.4 and above). Happily it can be easily fixed for earlier versions by redefining face-spec-recalc function (can be found on Emacs git mirror):

(defun face-spec-recalc (face frame)
  "Reset the face attributes of FACE on FRAME according to its specs.
This applies the defface/custom spec first, then the custom theme specs,
then the override spec."
  (while (get face 'face-alias)
    (setq face (get face 'face-alias)))
  (face-spec-reset-face face frame)
  ;; If FACE is customized or themed, set the custom spec from
  ;; `theme-face' records, which completely replace the defface spec
  ;; rather than inheriting from it.
  (let ((theme-faces (get face 'theme-face)))
    (if theme-faces
	(dolist (spec (reverse theme-faces))
	  (face-spec-set-2 face frame (cadr spec)))
      (face-spec-set-2 face frame (face-default-spec face))))
  (face-spec-set-2 face frame (get face 'face-override-spec)))

If you put it into your .emacs, you will always get pure themes without unintended face settings.

Screenshots

C, shell, linum, ido

Font: Anonymous Pro-13

Org, markdown

Font: DejaVu Sans Mono-12

Dired, elisp

Alternative themes, configured to invert background (see alternative configuration) like this:

(setq alect-inverted-color-regexp "^\\(bg\\)\\([-+]\\)\\([012]\\)$")

Font: Anonymous Pro-13

Feedback

If you want this package to support more faces, you may send me a letter about your favourite unsupported modes.