Protesilaos Stavrou

🏆 I provide private lessons on Emacs, Linux, and Life in general: https://protesilaos.com/coach/. Lessons continue throughout the year.

Emacs: modus-themes version 4.3.0

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

I will soon install the changes in emacs.git so please wait a little longer for the updates to trickle down to you.

All themes except the tritanopia ones have a new hover colour

The previous colour was not sufficiently distinct from what each theme defines for the bg-completion palette entry (preview a palette with M-x modus-themes-preview-colors or M-x modus-themes-preview-colors-current). This would make it hard to spot the difference while, for example, using vertico-mode in tandem with vertico-mouse-mode.

Same principle for the difference between the mouse hover and lazy isearch highlights (e.g. in Dired or Occur buffers).

Changing the hue here follows the same principle that underpinned the redesign of the grey backgrounds for version 4 of the project: depending on hardware capabilities, colour reproduction may not be optimal, so we need to be more considerate with the choice of colour values, erring on the side of caution.

The modus-operandi-tritanopia and modus-vivendi-tritanopia themes are not affected by this initiative, as they already used highly distinct hues.

Thanks to Daniel Mendler for bringing this matter to my attention and for testing the proposed alternatives. This was done via a private channel and the information is shared with permission. Daniel is the developer of vertico, among many other excellent packages: https://github.com/minad

Japanese holidays have the expected style

Japanese calendars style Saturdays uniquely and the Modus themes now do the same for those who use the japanese-holidays package. Saturdays show up in a blue colour (which changes to cyan for the modus-operandi-tritanopia, modus-vivendi-tritanopia themes).

Each theme’s palette has a new semantic colour mapping called date-holiday-other, just in case we ever encounter another scenario like this one (users can override any entry in the palette—consult the manual for the technicalities).

Thanks to Olaf Meeuwissen for bringing this package to my attention and showing me how traditional Japanese calendars style Saturdays. This was done in issue 311 on the GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/311.

Each theme has semantic colour mappings for terminal emulators

These are used by ansi-term, vterm, and the like. The idea is to empower users to differentiate background and foreground values, should they ever encounter a need to do so (when in doubt, do nothing).

By convention, terminal emulators use the same value for both background and foreground, although this is not optimal with high contrast themes because what works as a foreground does not necessarily look nice as a background.

The default values of the new mappings retain the prior state, just to not break existing configurations. Consider this a tacit user option for those who really need it.

Thanks to Tony Zorman for reporting the problem that provided the impetus for this change: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/modus-themes/%3C87fs4wforf.fsf%40hyperspace%3E.

All theme definitions conform with the latest standard for metadata

Themes are expected to declare their background type and affinity, such that the built-in command theme-choose-variant can do what it describes (switch between related themes). I was already doing this, though I had to make some adjustments. This is in response to Emacs bug#65468: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=65468. Thanks to Mauro Aranda for bringing the matter to my attention.

Proper colours for the inline preview of the corfu top candidate

The corfu-candidate-overlay package is used in tandem with the corfu package to create an inline preview of the first matching candidate. Thanks to Nicolas Semrau for bringing this matter to my attention in issue 89 on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/89.

Context indicators for the mode-line or header-line (breadcrumb.el)

I added support for the new breadcrumb package by João Távora. It displays information about where we are in the given file, such as under which Org heading or inside which function. The indicator can be shown on the mode-line or the header-line. Either way, it will now be legible and consistent with its surroundings.

The new family of nerd-icons is covered by the themes

This is a new set of packages: nerd-icons, nerd-icons-completion, ~nerd-icons-dired, nerd-icons-ibuffer. A popular package that uses the Nerd icons is doom-modeline, which the themes support as well.

All icons look as intended again

Some faces from the all-the-icons package were not configured because I accidentally changed their name from something like all-the-icons-red-alt to all-the-icons-red-warmer. I did that while renaming the colours defined in each theme’s palette, to make them more meaningful (“warmer red” can hint at something whereas “alt red” is more abstract).

Corrected the documentation about custom Org faces

The Modus themes manual shows how to configure arbitrary TODO keywords to inherit the style of an arbitrary face (get the list of faces present in your Emacs with M-x list-faces-display). The previous value I used was faulty. It now is as intended. Thanks to soaringbird for reporting the issue on the mailing list: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/modus-themes/%3CNXPVkVk--3-9%40tuta.io%3E.

The colours used by avy are better for users with tritanopia

I changed the sequence of colours displayed by commands such as avy-goto-char-timer such that each individual background does not blend with the ones adjacent to it, while respecting the overall needs of a tritanopia-friendly design. I also tweaked the colour values to achieve the desired result. The backgrounds remain distinct from their context but now also work harmoniously together.

The bg-dim palette entry is marginally brighter in all Modus operandi variants

After extensive testing and side-by-side comparisons, I have concluded that the marginal increase in brightness improves the affected interfaces.

The bg-dim background is used, among others, in the header-line, the popup of the company and corfu packages, as well as the Org source blocks (when the user option modus-themes-org-blocks is configured appropriately).

The “intense” palette override preset has new colours for tables and prose metadata

This concerns the modus-themes-preset-overrides-intense (refer to its documentation on how to use it). The primary target of these changes is Org mode and the overall effect is subtle. The previous colours did not combine nicely with all structural elements. For example, Org clocktables would obscure timestamps by being the same colour as them, while the table formula would not stand out. These styles did not fit into the concept of “intense” colours.

The “warmer” palette override preset has more legible strings

The modus-themes-preset-overrides-warmer uses a more prominent warm green value for strings in programming modes. The effect is subtle, though it fits in better with the overall aesthetic of these palette overrides.

Org document keywords like #+author are optionally monospaced

When the user option modus-themes-mixed-fonts is non-nil, all Org document keywords will be rendered with the fixed-pitch face. This ensures consistency between keywords such as #+author and “meta lines” like #+texinfo. Thanks to user fluentpwn for the change: it is one line and thus the author does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Git commit summary lines have a more precise style

This concerns the first line in a Git commit message, as seen while working with the magit package. Same principle for the log-edit buffer used by the built-in VC framework. Before, I was hardcoding a blue colour value, whereas now I apply the success face. The success face is designed to contrast with the warning face that is used to show overlong summaries. Furthermore, the added indirection makes it possible to particularise the colour value, which I do for the tritanopia themes that cannot use blue.

Miscellaneous

  • Removed explicit support for the built-in css-mode. Its default faces are decent. They inherit from standard font-lock faces that the themes already cover.

  • Recalibrated wordwise (“refined”) diffs for deuteranopia. The modus-operandi-deuteranopia and modus-vivendi-deuteranopia have a little bit more intense colour values applied to wordwise, else “refined”, diffs. These concern removed lines. The effect is visible while using magit or the built-in diff-mode.

  • Backported emacs.git commit 4cf33b6bd02b868ebbf112da7926d7c3c64517ce. It removed the space from the front matter of the modus-themes.org file (i.e. the manual) because the Org export did not produce the right results, per Emacs bug#64548. Thanks to Stephen Berman for reporting the issue and making the requisite change.

  • Added support for the erts-mode. Thanks to Kevin Fleming for informing me about this built-in mode. This was done in issue 85 on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/85.

  • Fixed a typo in the modus-themes-preset-overrides-intense doc string. Thanks to Nicolas Semrau for bringing this matter to my attention. It was done in issue 90 on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/90.

  • Made all commands that prompt for a theme (modus-themes-select, modus-themes-preview-colors) apply the theme category to the available candidates. This allows the user to target said category to affect the relevant functions. For example, to set completion styles with completion-category-overrides or to define a custom annotation function with the marginalia package.

  • Added support for new appt-notification face (Emacs 30). Change upstream by me.

Next:
Previous:
See all: Code blog entries