Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: modus-themes version 3.0.0

I just published the latest stable release of the Modus themes. The change log entry is reproduced below. For any questions, feel welcome to contact me.

I will now prepare the patch for emacs.git (currently Emacs 29) which will then trickle down to GNU ELPA (the modus-themes is a :core package). Thank you for your patience!

The version that will ship with Emacs 29

The modus-operandi and modus-vivendi themes (package name is modus-themes) have been a part of Emacs since August 2020. Emacs 28 ships with version 1.6.0 of the themes. Emacs 29 will include version 3.0.0.

There is no clean upgrade path from the old version of the themes to the current one. Users are advised to review their configurations and consult with the detailed manual of the themes.

I am available to answer any questions, either via my personal email or on the official sources of the themes. Find the full list here: https://protesilaos.com/emacs.

Minor breaking changes

I have changed the default value of the following user options:

  1. modus-themes-hl-line
  2. modus-themes-completions
  3. modus-themes-fringes

In the case of the first two, the background of the highlighted line is made to look a bit more intense.

For the fringes, this tweak makes them visible, using a subtle grey colour. By default, “fringe” is an 8-pixel-wide area to the left and right side of an Emacs window.

The intent of these changes is to make the out-of-the-box experience consistent with the accessibility considerations of the Modus themes. Specifically because some users may not realise that the themes are highly customisable.

To revert to the old defaults, users must include this (or equivalent) in their init file:

(setq modus-themes-completions nil
      modus-themes-hl-line nil
      modus-themes-fringes nil)

As always, changes to theme user options take effect upon a reload of the theme.

This was announced on my website: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2022-10-23-breaking-modus-themes-3-0-0-notice/.

Support for new faces or changes to existing ones

  • Refined the telega faces for inline code and preformatted elements. The faces are telega-entity-type-code and telega-entity-type-pre, respectively. This change makes them subject to the style specified in the user option modus-themes-markup.

    Thanks to Pablo Stafforini for showing me screenshots of how they look, as I am not a telega/telegram user and cannot do this myself. Done as part of issue 170 on the GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/170#note_1143975582.

  • Removed all attributes from the textsec-suspicious face. By default, it applies a background, but does not affect the foreground. The result is thus inaccessible in many cases (e.g. blue links against a red background). There is no need for such a background though, as the warnings are accompanied by the relevant emoji: ⚠️.

    To support this face, we need it to affect the foreground as well.

  • Deleted some consult “preview” faces in the interest of consistency. This is to match the current style of the project: https://github.com/minad/consult/commit/1343e39fefcf8a28a7a415aa4b0a8ff7094370bf.

  • Expanded support of the built-in diff-mode faces to include the diff-changed-unspecified. It is made to look the same as diff-changed, i.e. yellow-tinted. There is a good chance that a user will never see this face in action (I only encountered it once).

  • Reworked all the highlight-regexp faces (like hi-yellow) to use bespoke colour values.

    These faces need to have a background that is consistent with their semantics. Furthermore, they need to use the inverse-video attribute which, in turn, affects the combinations of colour we can apply. Our accented backgrounds are designed to contrast well with our nominal main foreground values, whereas this case demands coloured backgrounds that contrast nicely with what would normally be the main background colour. As such, we cannot apply our ordinary entries from each theme’s palette. It would be inefficient to expand the palette of each theme just for this edge case.

    Thanks to Kevin Kainan Li for the feedback on the mailing list, where they informed me that the previous design was too dark/mute (and I agreed with that assessment) and provided feedback on my samples: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/modus-themes/%3CCAMTq2Vp3Nnzv-i9wJdq4-OJ4X_QfWXySpUtAieBy0dgKLEOSBg%40mail.gmail.com%3E.

  • Recoloured the modus-themes-completion-match-1 to use a shade of blue instead of cyan. This contributes to the distinctiveness of those matches relative to modus-themes-completion-match-0 and the other groups. These faces are used in completion User Interfaces, such as vertico, corfu, orderless. They are subject to the user option modus-themes-completions.

  • Added support for the olivetti-fringe face. Its background is the same as the main background, meaning that the fringes are invisible when olivetti-mode is enabled. Thanks to Matthias Fuchs for producing a report that helped me track this problem. It was done in issue 46 on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/46.

Miscellaneous

  • Added the new Emacs 29 theme properties to modus-operandi and modus-vivendi. These make the themes work with the new built-in command toggle-theme. Thanks to Philip Kaludercic for the patch and for the work on this in emacs.git: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2022-10/msg00886.html.

  • Refrained from deprecating the modus-themes-toggle command in favour of the new generic toggle-theme.

    The toggle-theme is not functionally equivalent to the command modus-themes-toggle due to the optional arguments it accepts. With toggle-theme we are prompted to confirm loading the theme, due to how unsafe themes can be… Further, we are asked to add the loaded theme to the list of “safe” themes. This only applies to the packaged version of the modus-themes, not the items that are built into Emacs.

    These prompts are consistent with how load-theme works, but not with what the user of modus-themes-toggle has come to expect.

    Users who do not like to maintain a custom-file (like me) are thus penalised each time they invoke the command.

    The modus-themes-toggle will only be deprecated if there is, say, a user option in Emacs that disables those prompts each time a theme is loaded. Basically, we need an arrangement that just toggles themes without questions.

    Thanks to Rudolf Adamkovič for suggesting the idea and to Philip Kaludercic for the toggle-theme (and related functionality): https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/modus-themes/%3C877d116lh4.fsf%40posteo.net%3E#%3Cm2lepgrd8l.fsf@me.com%3E.

  • Corrected the one-line description of the modus-vivendi theme, which was describing itself as a “light” theme.

  • Ensured that the manual and all doc strings in the code uses American English, per the convention of emacs.git (my CHANGELOG still uses what I prefer). Thanks to Stefan Kangas for contributing to this effort with a patch that properly renders non-nil in the texinfo output as non-@code{nil}.

  • Made other minor tweaks and refinements.

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