Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: 'standard-themes' version 1.1.0

The standard-themes are a pair of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs. They emulate the out-of-the-box looks of Emacs (which technically do NOT constitute a theme) while bringing to them thematic consistency, customizability, and extensibility. In practice, the Standard themes take the default style of the font-lock and Org faces, complement it with a wider colour palette, address some inconsistencies, and apply established semantic patterns across all interfaces.

Below are the release notes.

The standard-themes-headings now covers the Org agenda

The user option standard-themes-headings lets the user control the height, weight, and use of proportionately spaced fonts (variable-pitch) on a per-heading basis. Different combinations are possible, as explained in the option’s doc string on the corresponding entry in the manual.

I have now made it possible to specify the agenda-date and agenda-structure keys. Both pertain to the Org agenda. The former applies to date headings, while the latter styles the headings of each “block” of content. In a generic agenda buffer, that block heading is the first line which reads Week-agenda (W49): or something like that, though we find such headings in more places as well.

Here is a sample with various stylistic variants per heading:

(setq standard-themes-headings ; read the manual's entry or the doc string
      '((0 . (variable-pitch light 1.9))
        (1 . (variable-pitch light 1.8))
        (2 . (semilight 1.7))
        (3 . (semilight 1.6))
        (4 . (1.5)) ; absence of weight means "regular"
        (5 . (1.4))
        (6 . (bold 1.3))
        (7 . (bold 1.2))
        (agenda-date . (semilight 1.5))
        (agenda-structure . (variable-pitch light 1.9))
        (t . (variable-pitch 1.1))))

Note that Org re-uses heading levels past 8. This means that level 9 will look the same as level 1. This is not the theme’s doing. Check the user options org-level-faces, org-n-level-faces for ways to change this.

M-x theme-choose-variant works as expected

Users of Emacs 29 have access to the command theme-choose-variant: it toggles between two themes of the same family. If the family has more members, it uses minibuffer completion instead.

I registered the appropriate theme properties to make this work as intended. However, it is still possible to use the command standard-themes-toggle.

Stylistic refinements

  • Simplified the Magit blame faces to avoid exaggerations.
  • Revised the colours of day headings in the M-x calendar buffer. Weekends stand out, as is the case with physical calendars and many established apps.
  • Made the edmacro-label face stand out in its context. Otherwise it was difficult to spot. This is for Emacs 29 and applies to headings in the keyboard macro editing buffer (e.g. with C-x C-k C-e (kmacro-edit-macro-repeat)).
  • Added support for the powerline package.
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