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Comment by moth-fuzz | Hacker News Reader

Dracula is a fine theme, however, I feel like it's more convenient than it is pretty. I admire Dracula, Nord, and Gruvbox and how committed they are to their own aesthetics - my personal favorite, similar to Gruvbox, is Alduin[0] but sadly it's for Vim only.

I only wish popular themes didn't feel like they had to use every primary color for the text. I wish we took the popular themes and made them even more opinionated, fewer colors with greater emphasis. At the end of the day most themes nowadays are just different shades of all rainbow text over your choice of a light or dark background. Dark or light... It reminds me of that theory about how early humans, before having words for different colors, only had light and dark to describe things.

Does anyone have any recommendations for opinionated color schemes with limited palettes with emphasis on particular colors instead of just dark/light?

0. https://github.com/AlessandroYorba/Alduin

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I actually prefer having as many different colors as possible. A class definition is orange, functions are pink, strings are green, ... (Material theme). It's just very clear at a glance. If everything's a subtle shade of one color, it's just harder to parse for no good (?) reason.

I agree, I'm a fan of the whole 'somebody slaughtered a herd of unicorns' approach to colouring code. It makes it very clear at a glance which keyword is doing what, which is always an advantage. I guess such things are very subjective though.

I like this too. Obviously I avoid high-contrast schemes, but something like one dark or monokai is easy on the eyes.

Yes! I'm not sure of your preferred editor but for Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA there is the Alabaster theme.

You can read up more on its "manifesto" here. Variants to cover the rest besides the light theme on VS Code are at the bottom of the page.

https://github.com/tonsky/vscode-theme-alabaster

+1 for alabaster.

The older I get, thr harder dark themes are for my eyes to parse.

This is a wonderful light theme with limited distractions.

Dark means wide-open pupils, means shallow depth-of-field, means more & constant focus adjustments are needed.

Do what I do:

Black text on white background (or the reverse, if you’re a philistine.)

Select a color for comments.

Select a color for strings.

Done.

Anything more, and the display looks like someone threw a bag of Skittles at the screen.

I agree. One addition to this is that I configure my themes so that heading-like constructs are displayed in bold; in C that would be function names in function declarations (and definitions), and in HTML say, it would be the content of <h1> to <h6> elements. The motivation for this is the same as for highlighting headings in ordinary prose; it makes it easier to get an overview of where you are in the text.

With all respect, you forgot about keywords. Don’t you like it when classes, functions, ifs and fors do stand out?

But yeah, modern semantic coloring (args/members/vars/globals/upvalues/…) looks like a catastrophic oil spill.

Like another commenter in this thread, I like to highlight the function name in function definitions. That's about it though. I don't like language keywords (if, for, def, etc) highlighted.

I'm a real fan of Modus Themes[0]. They are only officially for emacs, but I've seen some ports for other programs (like vim). All the colors are very specifically chosen for contrast and accessibility. It's my favorite light theme out there. I do wish the dark theme background wasn't pure black. Both of these themes now ship with emacs 28, which is a nice bonus.

0. https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes

Would recommend checking out Github color themes for VSCode if you use that: https://github.com/primer/github-vscode-theme

I feel these themes strike a very nice balance in color contrasts and finally provide me with a light theme I can also use, although being a dark theme user for who knows how many years, the github light theme just works really nicely.

They also have two variations of both themes, which is nice, for changing around when one or the other starts to feel boring or unreadable.

Oh wow. Alduin looks nigh-illegible to me.

Might be an effect of macOS's auto-color-temp adjusting. On a monitor that's set so it's like staring into the sun (how most other monitors feel, once you're used to that feature) maybe it's easier to read.

The ones I use are Emacs-Zenburn (other colors than 'usual' Zenburn)

https://github.com/bbatsov/zenburn-emacs

and Groovy Lambda for Code, similar to Gruvbox (because it supports more syntax elements)

https://github.com/sheaf/groovy-lambda

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