Protesilaos Stavrou

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Emacs: ef-themes version 1.2.0

The ef-themes is a collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs whose goal is to provide colourful (“pretty”) yet legible options for users who want something with a bit more flair than the modus-themes (also designed by me).

Below are the release notes.

Enjoy the new “Elea” variants

The ef-elea-light and ef-elea-dark take inspiration from olives and olive trees. Their background is noticeably more subdued than that of other Ef themes, making Elea optimal for times where environmental light is neither too high nor too low.

Blog post that announced the new themes and presented their screen shots: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2023-06-18-ef-elea-dark-light/.

Those who like primarily green-tinted themes can also try ef-spring (light) and ef-bio (dark).

The ef-themes collection now consists of 24 items, covering a broad range of preferences and legibility needs. Each theme is tested extensively for stylistic consistency, as well as overall effectiveness across the full spectrum of interfaces encountered in Emacs.

Support for the avy package

The avy package is now fully supported by the themes. This was not a trivial task, due to Avy’s unique requirement for sufficiently high contrast between adjacent coloured background in addition to the goal of the themes for comfortably high contrast between each given combination of foreground and background. To make the task even more demanding, we have to account for colour deficiency, as in the case of the tritanopia-optimised themes: ef-tritanopia-light, ef-tritanopia-dark (tritanopia is blue-yellow colour deficiency).

Support for other Avy-like elements

The corfu and vertico packages provide Avy-like commands to select a candidate in their respective completion interface. Those are now fully supported, benefitting from the aforementioned work.

Explicit support for which-key

The popular which-key package was already implicitly supported by the themes. Its faces inherit from standard font-lock faces. I decided to add explicit support in order to override its overall style, as its default is too busy, although it technically works. This hints at the unseen, yet non-trivial, effort themes require to avoid exaggerations (in short: when everything is emphasised, nothing stands out; when something indicates a familiar element of the interface, it must have an equally familiar styling to minimise friction/uncertainty).

Support for csv-mode

The csv-mode defines the face of a separator character for the tabular entries. Its colour should now be easier to spot.

Revised the Git summary line

The colour of the Git commit summary line, both for Magit and VC, is now drawn from each theme’s semantic info colour, whereas before it was another accent colour. The reason for this change is to make the summary line always contrast nicely with the overlong summary warning (the warning is visible when the length of the summary exceeds the specified limit (check each package’s configurations)).

Miscellaneous

  • Completion annotations are not shown for yet-to-be-loaded Ef themes. This avoids errors in modus-themes-select and related commands that use minibuffer completion. Thanks to Christopher League for the patch. The change is small and falls within the limits of what is allowed without assigning copyright to the Free Software Foundation. This case was discussed in issue 22 on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes/issues/22.

  • The documentation of ef-themes-headings uses simpler list constructs. There is no user-facing change. Thanks to Eshel Yaron for the patch, which is within the boundaries of what is possible with copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/ef-themes/patches/42030.

  • The manual of the themes, as well as the contrast-ratios.org file that is part of the project’s Git repository, are reviewed to reflect the current state of the ef-themes.

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