Emacs: 'standard-themes' version 2.2.0

The standard-themes are a collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs. The standard-light and standard-dark 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. Other themes are stylistic variations of those.

In practice, the Standard themes take the default style of the font-lock and Org faces, complement it with a wider and harmonious colour palette, address many inconsistencies, and apply established semantic patterns across all interfaces by supporting a large number of packages.

Below are the release notes.


This version contains a few refinements to an already stable base.

Enjoy the new “tinted” themes

I now provide the standard-light-tinted and standard-dark-tinted themes in addition to standard-light and standard-dark. The announcement I made about these new themes also includes screenshots of them: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-12-17-emacs-standard-themes-tinted/.

The standard-light-tinted theme has an earthly feel to it, with hints of magenta. It otherwise follows the stylistic patterns of its standard-light counterpart.

The standard-dark-tinted theme has a dark blue background in combination with appropriate shades of magenta. It, too, is stylistically consistent with its standard-dark counterpart.

Command to rotate themes

The standard-themes-rotate goes through the Standard themes defined in the user option standard-themes-to-rotate. It does so in order from left to right, starting from the currently loaded theme. By default, the value of standard-themes-to-rotate is:

'(standard-light standard-light-tinted standard-dark standard-dark-tinted)

Users who plan to only use two themes can rely instead on the command standard-themes-toggle and its standard-themes-to-toggle variable.

Explicit support for the lin and pulsar packages

These packages highlight the current line. By extending support to their faces, we guarantee that they always look right with the given Standard theme.

The palette preview use a tabular view

The commands standard-themes-list-colors and standard-themes-list-colors-current are redesigned to show colours in a tabular layout.

The practical advantage for users is that they can now sort the entries by column: move the cursor to the desired column and type S (or M-x tabulated-list-sort). Do it again to reverse the sorting.

This can be achieved with the mouse as well: move the pointer to the relevant column heading and use left click (well, <mouse-1> to be precise) to select and then reverse the sorting.

Remember that the Standard themes provides a comprehensive mechanism of named colours and semantic mappings, which can be overridden. Thus, it is possible for one to define a spin-off of these themes by only changing a few colour values. Refer to the manual for the details, or contact me.