Show HN: Themer – a CLI for generating themes for all your tools
github.com
github.com
I was expecting to find this within the `themer-terminal` repo, but instead it's just some mac thing.
Themer is a set of npm packages that allow for generating custom, matching themes for many of your development tools (editors, terminal emulators, desktop/device wallpaper, Slack sidebar, Chrome theme, Alfred, etc.). A custom color palette can be used, or there are a number of pre-built palettes to choose from.
But the site is just informational--if you don't want to install the Node toolchain, you can use the GUI wrapper around themer (https://github.com/mjswensen/themer-gui), a cross platform app built on Electron. There are downloadable builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux (https://github.com/mjswensen/themer-gui/releases).
From my classification this seems similar to base16 https://github.com/chriskempson/base16
Is this correct and would you like to clarify the benefits of using themer instead of base16? Have you considered intercompatibility by i.e. allow conversion from and to base16 themes?
themer is inspired by trevordmiller/nova and chriskempson/base16.
Conceptually, themer is very similar to base16, but:
1. It is lighter, and simpler to use. 2. It is more easily extensible with your own color sets and templates. 3. It integrates better with your dotfiles, especially if you keep them under version control.
One thing I will add is that I found base16 more challenging to use if I wanted to use a custom color set instead of the default ones. It was also difficult for me to tell which packages of that project were maintained, which were deprecated, and how the packages were organized in general.
Back to base16, if you'd add base16 as an input and output you'd be able to benefit both by expanding the available set of themes with those of base16 and expanding the set of output formats to those supported by that ecosystem. That would make your tool far more interesting for someone like me who's already using base16.
But I agree that the quick and simple install is a huge plus. Perhaps in the future theme authors could use a tool like themer to generate their themes rather than each author individually spending time figuring out how to apply their theme to a particular tool.
The comparison to mobile development comes to mind. There are cross platform options like cordova or xamarin but they are usually beaten by native implementations. Now, if the cost of doing things twice outweights by large the drop in quality it is still a viable option; hence their existance. However, with themes I’d say the cost of redoing is most likely not outweighting developping in the native application option.