Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: breaking changes coming to 'modus-themes' version 4

The next release of the modus-themes brings many refinements but also a few breaking changes. I plan to release it at the end of December or the beginning of January. Everything is in development, decisions are not final, and I am interested in your feedback. The code is in the version-4 branch. It will become part of main only when I feel it is ready for widespread adoption.

More pronounced grey backgrounds

A pain point for many users is the perception of “invisible” background values. These are shades of grey that many monitors cannot reproduce accurately. For example, some tests for LCD displays:

I have revised all such backgrounds and expect everything to be easier to spot. This includes the mode lines, the header line, tabs, fringes, region, diff hunk headings, and related.

Fewer colours and semantic colour mappings

The colour palettes used to have lots of ad-hoc entries. These are all removed in favour of reusing existing colours more efficiently.

Colours are now named meaningfully. The pattern of HUE-alt becomes HUE-warmer, while HUE-alt-other is HUE-cooler.

The new colour mappings let us abstract how a value is assigned to individual faces. For example, there now are entries for builtin, string, variable so making a change to one affects all relevant faces at once.

Faces defined by the Modus themes are drastically reduced in number. Those were simply incorporating and propagating those special-purpose colours.

Deprecation of colour overrides and new themes

I used to provide user options for overriding colour values. Those are no longer available as they made the code more complex. Instead, the new design makes it possible to define new Modus themes at the user level: I will write documentation to that end.

Two new Modus themes are in the works, serving the dual purpose of (i) providing useful alternatives to modus-operandi and modus-vivendi, and (ii) showing how new themes can be introduced without affecting the main modus-themes.el file.

The new themes were anticipated maybe 2 years ago and you can find hints about them in the manual: a light ochre modus-operandi and a night-sky modus-vivendi.

Deprecation of user options

Several user options are deprecated, while others will be simplified. The intent is to reduce the number of possible colour combinations. Those combinations require ad-hoc entries in the colour palette and, generally, make things harder to maintain and explain.

There also is the idea that tweaking certain face attributes is best done at the user level, due to the ultimate flexibility it offers. For example, why offer an option for “yellow comments” when it is easier to configure font-lock-comment-face? Again, the manual will show how to do it and recommend some colours (e.g. to try the red-faint from the new colour palettes).

Instead of user options with stylistic permutations of dubious value, relevant faces will be revised to have more reasonable defaults. For example, the background used to highlight the matching parenthesis of show-paren-mode is easier to discern.

Review of supported packages

Support for several packages will be discontinued. Covering thousands of faces is not sustainable (and more keep coming). Instead, we as a community must learn to either inherit from basic faces (e.g. font-lock) OR define reasonable/legible defaults that work across all reasonable themes. When some defface form fails this test, we should be patching it for the benefit of all users.

If you use a package that I no longer support (e.g. helm or dired+), I encourage you to ask its maintainer to do the right thing: play nicely with the vast majority of themes by inheriting from basic faces.

Ongoing development

Again, nothing is final. We still have a month to go and I will extend it further if necessary. If you have any comments, please speak your mind.

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