Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: ef-themes version 1.11.0

The ef-themes are a collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs that 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.

Version 1.11.0 on 2025-09-25

This version introduces minor refinements to a stable package.

Support for faces added to Emacs 31

Emacs 31 is the current development target of Emacs. The new faces are header-line-inactive, package-mark-delete-face, package-mark-install-face, minibuffer-nonselected.

Mode lines are a bit easier to spot

The active and inactive mode lines now have a subtle box/border around them on graphical Emacs. In non-graphical sessions, an underline is applied instead. This makes mode lines easier to stand out even when the buffer is showing a background that is of a similar colour to their own background.

The Custom interface buttons are more refined

These are the buttons that appear in the Custom buffers that we reach through various means such as M-x customize. Like with the mode lines, they use a box/border around where possible, else fall back to an underline.

The current date in the M-x calendar always looks the same

Before, it would look different if the Calendar was produced via M-x calendar as opposed to the Org date selection interface. This is because they apply different faces to the current date. Those are now reworked to look the same.

Notmuch message summary headers have clear dividers

In the Notmuch email client, the messages in a thread can be collapsed/minimised to just a heading. Those used to have only a subtle background, which would be enough to differentiate them from the body of the email but not from each other when all were collapsed. Now the themes add an overline to each heading, if supported by the underlying display engine (i.e. graphical Emacs), which should make it easier to spot them.

Links in the header line of Info buffers do not have an underline

This is because the header line has a distinct background already, so we want to avoid exaggerations.

The commands ef-themes-rotate and ef-themes-load-random can be silent

They now accept an optional SILENT parameter that inhibits the message they otherwise print. Thanks to Sean Devlin for the contribution in pull request 59: https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes/pull/59.

Note that any function can be silenced with something like this:

(defun my-wrapper-of-some-function ()
  (let ((inhibit-message t))
    (some-function)))
Previous:
See all: Code blog entries