Protesilaos Stavrou

Modus themes 1.1.0 for GNU Emacs

Just published version 1.1.0 of the Modus themes. The release notes are reproduced below. For any questions pertaining to this publication, or anything else for that matter, feel welcome to contact me.

Please note that the version of the themes currently in Emacs 28 is 0.13.0, though we are working towards keeping everything in sync. Likewise, GNU ELPA is at 0.12.0 and will eventually be made to pull directly from emacs.git. This is a volunteer effort: things need their time, also in light of the prevailing conditions.

Modus themes version 1.1.0

By Protesilaos Stavrou info@protesilaos.com on 2021-01-24

This entry records the changes introduced to the project since the publication of version 1.0.0 (2020-12-05). There have been around 150 commits in the meantime, qualifying this as one of the largest releases to date.

As always, every colour-related modification documented herein conforms with the overarching accessibility objective of the themes for a minimum contrast ratio of 7:1 between background and foreground values in their given combination (conformance with the WCAG AAA standard).

As the official manual is referenced several times, make sure to store its URL: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes.

If you are coming from older versions, please consult the change log entry for version 1.0.0.

Overview

  • We have brought back the options that were present in version 0.13.0 or earlier which allowed users to override colors for either—or both—of Modus Operandi and Modus Vivendi. Compared to the old mechanism, the new one is more robust and should work regardless of whether users run byte compiled code or not. This is considered and advanced, “do-it-yourself” pathway to theme customisation. It is discussed at length in the manual.

  • The new modus-themes-with-colors macro makes it possible to read palette variables from the active theme and, thus, pass them to arbitrary functions or variables. Again, this is part of the advanced customisations that are covered in the manual.

  • Several of the existing customisation options provide new stylistic variants, further expanding their utility. While there are some new customisations altogether. Combined with the above, we provide the infrastructure that allows the themes to adapt gracefully to a variety of circumstances and cover a broad range of demands.

  • More packages are added to the already comprehensive list of supported face groups.

  • Some of the supported faces have benefited from further, albeit subtle, refinements, demonstrating our commitment to consistency as well as our attention to detail.

  • Two reports on such “further refinements” were published on the code log section of protesilaos.com: https://protesilaos.com/codelog.

  • We have more people contributing to the project (and assigning copyright to the FSF—as the themes are part of Emacs) and newer users reporting issues. Also, there is anecdotal evidence from several sources on an increased interest to make new or existing faces accessible by default (such as by copying colour combinations from the themes).

New customisation options

  • The existing modus-themes-mode-line variable now supports three new borderless styles: borderless, borderless-3d, borderless-moody.

    • The borderless value uses the same colors as the default (nil value), but removes the border effect. This is done by making the box property use the same color as the background, effectively blending the two and creating some padding.

    • The borderless-3d and borderless-moody approximate the 3d and moody options respectively, while removing the borders. However, to ensure that the inactive modelines remain visible, they apply a slightly more prominent background to them than what their counterparts do (same inactive background as with the default).

    The complete list of options:

    1. nil (default)
    2. 3d
    3. moody
    4. borderless
    5. borderless-3d
    6. borderless-moody

  • modus-themes-lang-checkers provides several styles for spell checkers and code linters with regard to how they underline text. The default (nil) is to use a colour-coded wavy underline, without changing the foreground of the affected text. Other options include the ability to set a straight underline and to control the saturation of the foreground, while one also provides for a change in the background of the text in question. The valid symbols are as follows (read the manual for more on the matter):

    1. nil (default)
    2. straight-underline
    3. subtle-foreground
    4. subtle-foreground-straight-underline
    5. intense-foreground
    6. intense-foreground-straight-underline
    7. colored-background

  • The modus-themes-org-habit lets users pick between three styles for the org-habit table: (1) nil (the default), which uses a total of eight colours, (2) ‘simplified’ which reduces the effective colours to four, while applying less saturated hues, and (3) traffic-light which bring the colour count to three, thus blending the “clear” and “ready” states for workflows where the distinction between is not useful.

    Please read the manual for a more detailed description of those variants.

    Thanks to Gustavo Barros for suggesting the idea, providing user feedback on stylistic choices, as well as sharing insights on the workflow that made the traffic-light style possible: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/135.

  • modus-themes-variable-pitch-ui when set to a non-nil value applies a proportionately spaced typeface (controlled by the variable-pitch face) to the User Interface, specifically the mode line, header line, and tab-{bar,line}.

  • The existing modus-themes-links variable now has a colourless stylistic alternative: underline-only. The available styles:

    1. nil (default)
    2. faint
    3. neutral-underline
    4. faint-neutral-underline
    5. no-underline
    6. underline-only

  • The existing modus-themes-prompts variable has two new grayscale styles: subtle-gray, intense-gray. Furthermore, their old subtle and intense values have more informative aliases in the form of subtle-accented and intense-accented. All available values:

    1. nil (default)
    2. subtle-accented (subtle remains for backward-compatibility)
    3. intense-accented (intense remains for backward-compatibility)
    4. subtle-gray
    5. intense-gray

  • The existing modus-themes-headings variable now accepts two new styles: no-color, no-color-no-bold. All stylistic variants:

    1. nil (default fallback option—covers all heading levels)
    2. t (default style for a single heading, when the fallback differs)
    3. no-bold
    4. line
    5. line-no-bold
    6. rainbow
    7. rainbow-line
    8. rainbow-line-no-bold
    9. highlight
    10. highlight-no-bold
    11. rainbow-highlight
    12. rainbow-highlight-no-bold
    13. section
    14. section-no-bold
    15. rainbow-section
    16. rainbow-section-no-bold
    17. no-color
    18. no-color-no-bold

    Please read the manual for instructions on how to apply those universally or on a per-level basis.

Added support for packages

Refinements to already supported faces

  • Reviewed the rainbow-delimiters faces. Everything is documented in a separate report (with screenshots). The short version is that we pay close attention to detail and are willing to go to great lengths in pursuit of improving the overall user experience: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2020-12-27-modus-themes-review-rainbow-delimiters/.

  • Updated the dedicated colours for whitespace-mode. The background should now be easier to discern. Also removed any remaining inconsistencies. Thanks to Toon Claes for the feedback: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/149.

  • Refined the faces of regexp constructs for strings affected by certain values passed to the modus-themes-syntax option. This is done to disambiguate the backslashes and grouping delimiters from the rest of the string. The relevant values for modus-themes-syntax are:

    • green-strings
    • yellow-comments-green-strings
    • alt-syntax
    • alt-syntax-yellow-comments

    The default colour for strings is blue, while regexp faces are yellow and red, whereas in those variants the strings become green, hence the need to make regexp faces more distinct (blue and magenta contrast better with green and also between themselves, thus matching the alternative aesthetics).

  • Reviewed dictionary.el faces (which ships with Emacs 28):

    • Made dictionary-reference-face look like all other links.

    • Removed all properties from dictionary-word-definition-face: the default sets a font family, which can create inconsistencies.

    • Converted dictionary-word-entry-face into comment-like text.

  • Refined and expanded the faces of Consult.

    • Made its grep commands look the same as those of all other grep tools.

    • Ensured that line number previews, such as for the consult-line command use their own style of a subtle foreground instead of inheriting from the line-number face. This is to avoid cases where previewed numbers and actual line numbers could be conflated for one another.

    • Removed the foreground pertinent to consult-imenu-prefix, as its bold weight combined with the structure of Imenu indices was deemed sufficient to differentiate it from actual consult-imenu targets.

  • Eliminated exaggerations in the use of colour for various which-key faces.

  • Removed the needless background from the log-view-commit-body face. This is a new face that ships with Emacs 28 (its inclusion upstream was documented in the last changelog entry).

  • Applied a subtle background to the log-view-message face, in the interest of improving the usability of its interface, in particular, to contribute to heightened situational awareness while invoking log-view-toggle-entry-display in buffers such as those produced by vc-print-root-log.

  • Introduced a neutral background for all outline-minor-faces instead of merely mirroring the style of outline-mode headings. This is because it can sometimes be hard to tell whether outline-minor-mode is active, provided certain fairly common configurations in the modus-themes-headings user option (refer to the manual for all customisation options).

  • Tweaked diff-mode headings.

    • Adjusted the values of the dedicated colours for diff headings in order to amplify their relative contrast.

    • Assigned a bold typographic weight to the diff-hunk-header face so as to enforce a greater sense of structure.

    • Instructed diff-function to inherit modus-theme-diff-heading in order to eliminate exaggerations in colouration.

  • Removed unnecessary underline from selectrum-current-candidate. Thanks to Daniel Mendler for the feedback: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/132.

  • Made counsel-outline inherit from the underlying Org faces. Also corrected the style of counsel-outline-default to use the main foreground colour. Thanks to Gustavo Barros for the feedback: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/134.

  • Prevented headings, ultimately governed by the modus-themes-headings user option, from inheriting the default face as that could lead to unintended consequences, such as by retaining a background colour when none was expected.

  • Refashioned all faces that specified a foreground value of fg-alt to inherit the shadow face instead (fg-alt is the colour that is used, for example, in code comments by default). This makes it possible for users to enact change across the theme just by tweaking shadow.

  • Fixed ruler-mode text scaling adjustment, to make it cope well with text-scale-adjust and relevant commands. Also introduced minor stylistic changes to the remainder of the ruler-mode faces.

  • Eliminated the potentially problematic form of :foreground nil from the org-ellipsis face. In such cases it is always better to either specify no foreground whatsoever, or declare an unspecified value.

Patches from the community

Remember that the themes are part of Emacs and, thus, contributions that exceed a cumulative total of ~15 lines require the assignment of copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Please consult the themes’ manual on the matter.

Any remaining faults that may exist, despite our best intentions to remove them, are those of the maintainer and will be addressed as soon as they are identified.

FSF copyright status:

Full name Copyright
Anders Johansson covered
Carlo Zancanaro not required
Kostadin Ninev covered
Nicolas De Jaeghere covered
Xinglu Chen not required

Theme-related contributions to the wider community

Miscellaneous

  • Created a new palette subset for “graph” colours, as none of the existing paradigms would suffice for cases where faithfulness to colour huenesss is important. Those are currently used by modus-themes-org-habit.

  • Ensured that theme functions which need to produce an error message do so by calling error instead of user-error.

  • Added a modus-themes-load-themes function that users can add to their init files.

  • Expanded the project’s git repo README file with a sample use-package configuration.

  • The previous two points followed from an inquiry into the subtleties between enable-theme and load-theme. Those are now documented at length in the manual.

  • Added screenshots to the web page that holds the official manual. Thanks to Damien Cassou for the feedback: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/147.

  • Swapped the values of cyan-faint and cyan-alt-faint for Modus Vivendi.

  • Tweaked font-lock-doc-face and font-lock-type-face variations when “faint syntax” is in effect: (setq modus-themes-syntax ‘faint).

  • Refined font-lock-doc-face for when modus-themes-syntax is given a value of either yellow-comments-green-strings or green-strings. The changes are minor when treated in isolation, though they have helped improve the overall consistency of the end result: the gestalt.

  • Reviewed select “faint” colours for both Modus Operandi and Modus Vivendi. The technicalities are discussed in a complete report: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-01-11-modus-themes-review-select-faint-colours/.

  • Ensured that (setq modus-themes-syntax ‘alt-syntax) and its “yellow comments” variant are more truthful to their intended style, by eliminating any exaggerations in the use of colour.

  • Adjusted the saturation of the green-alt value of Modus Vivendi.

  • Updated the manual to reflect all of the aforementioned.

Thanks once again to everyone who contributed patches or reported an issue. This has been yet another period of intense work; work which helps solidify the Modus themes as (i) uncompromisingly accessible in accordance with the highest legibility standard, (ii) highly customisable in true Emacs fashion, (iii) thoroughly comprehensive in terms of face coverage, and (iv) meticulously designed throughout.

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