Flexoki, an inky color scheme for prose and code | Hacker News Reader

Flexoki, an inky color scheme for prose and code

stephango.com

194 pointssurprisetalk42 comments

Screenshots would have made this much easier to comprehend. The website presumably uses the scheme but only two colours, one of which is black. So its subjectively impossible to see how it differs from any other 2 colour scheme using a muted/warm background.

Some simple diagrams, or photos rendered into a compatible colourscheme, or some reason to inject colour into the word flow, SOMETHING to illustrate.

Indeed. If the color scheme is for prose and code, show how it looks with prose and code, IMO. The obsidian theme has this screenshot in the README: https://github.com/kepano/flexoki-obsidian/raw/main/cover.pn...

But again, it's not really showing that much either.

The more documentation I see the more angry this makes me. Why would you include the color palette everywhere but literally zero examples of any of the colors being used? All of the screenshots only show the basic black/white text.

In its defence, the image says it is for Obsidian, so that is probably its intended use right there, in the screenshots.

Also in its defence: it costs nothing.

Feedback and critisism can be great, but why be hostile towards projects where a person has used their time to build something and release it gratis.

Hostility is taking it too far, but I think it’s quite odd that the author has neglected to provide any screenshots in their blog post or readme despite dedicating a lot of text to justify their color choices and design.

I think we're very used to encountering projects that have a level of polish or completeness. It's jarring when we come across amateur (for the love of) projects and homepages that lack such.

For the record, I agree, I found I wanted a better look at all the theme had to offer.

I am just a little fed up with this kind of entitlement that comes when someone puts something they've created out there. We want to encourage people to release their stuff, even if it is a little rough. Give them tips, help them. Don't just attack it. IMO HN will be better for it.

But maybe that's just me

I completely get what you’re saying - but this is not an /amateur/ release? Clearly the author cares a lot about design, has put together a blog and repo, launched the theme for obsidian and iterm, etc

Edit: Not sure why you’re framing this thread by different HNers as an attack somehow and your last statement feels judgmental.

Perhaps it's archaic, but I was using the word amateur to mean "for the love of"

Edit

> Not sure why you’re framing this thread by different HNers as an attack somehow and your last statement feels judgmental.

I wasn't talking about the criticisms themselves, heck, I agree with them. I was more referring to the fact someone felt entitled to a good user experience they got angry.

Perhaps I'm being oversensitive on behalf of the guy who put effort into releasing this. But this isn't isolated, often people get punished for putting something out there that does not have a certain level of polish, I think that's totally counterproductive.

I think it's a bit strange to be so gung-ho about unpolished/amateur projects on hacker news. I think part of the hacker culture is sort messing around and sharing your findings, right or wrong. I don't think thats orthogonal to polish, but I think that sometimes includes unpolished work.

I do agree with you, in other words. I would prefer if we encouraged amateur work.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. It's really easy to trash on someone for not getting it right, but IMO we should congratulate on the achievement of actually making something, and give feedback on how to make it better.

Screenshots would have and I don't know why the author didn't add them when they have added them on Twitter[1]. I like the idea but still too low contrast for my personal preference.

[1] https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1710807755140030754

Added screenshots, thanks for the feedback! I was planning to do so, but it was just getting a bit late when I published this. My website is always a work in progress :)

https://github.com/kepano/flexoki/blob/main/flexoki-code.png

What’s the font used in those screenshots? It looks great!

MonoLisa

> I wish it could have been more science than art, but it wasn’t

There is this tendency towards scientism in digital colour theory, which sticks out because I noticed myself doing it in a related project. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but don’t forget that the science is trying to measure our perception. I don’t think we should be overly concerned if we sometimes rely more on our actual perception than an attempt to measure it.

Also, "science" is the research and learning phase. The output of science is theories, reports and models. The output of science is not "stuff you use". "Engineering" is the production phase, and "engineering" is always a little bit "art".

The SIGGRAPH talk linked towards the end of the article is absolutely fascinating. The demo at 16:30 shows just how much more vivid the simulated pigments are compared to regular RGB color mixing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qa5iWdfNKg

    "Ethan Schoonover’s color scheme Solarized (2011) was an important inspiration for Flexoki."

No kidding, the first thing I thought of when I saw Flexoki was "This looks like Solarized Light, but with darker darks!"

As someone who is always looking for light color schemes (currently using Selenized[1], by the way), I’ll give it a try.

[1]: https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized

I love to try multiple color schems for code and the terminal... but if I see no actual screenshots then I'll pass. I mean, isn't that "common sense"? The very first thing one wants to see in a colorscheme is how it looks like (not the hex codes)

How do you make a website for a color theme and don't show any screenshots or examples on the page? I don't get it. Not a bad theme tho.

Author here. Thanks for sharing Flexoki! I was not expecting this project to get so much attention. Originally this color scheme was only meant for personal use on my site (primarily prose), but I kept getting questions about the colors I use so I decided to expand it to code and publish it.

I am amazed to see how many ports have already been created. Flexoki is only a day old and has already received ports for iTerm2, Neovim, macOS Terminal, Windows Terminal, shadcn, Tailwind, GIMP, Kitty... I appreciate all the contributions and am doing my best to merge them as they come in.

I have also added some more screenshots for those who wanted a better look at the syntax highlighting:

https://github.com/kepano/flexoki/blob/main/flexoki-code.png

If you like this, you might also want to check out Nord Theme[1]. It was discussed earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406069

1. https://www.nordtheme.com

I've been using https://earl-grey.halt.wtf/ which I quite like (if you find it doesn't have enough contrast, try increasing the font weight a bit).

Looks nice, some kind soul should add it to emacs themes https://github.com/emacs-themes/emacs-themes-site

Thank you for volunteering.

How is your comment different from grandparent’s comment? If I’m understanding correctly, you both want someone else to do it.

One thing that Chatgpt is good at is transferring color schemes. It would be trival to do.

It would turn out to be horrible and then would need manual tweaking anyway. Better to skip the middleman.

It would setup the boilerplate though. That’s primarily what I use it for.

Nope, I am not an emacs user.

I was merely pointing out that if you need something, the correct way is to do it and share, not asking the plebe to do it for you. Moreso when it comes to something trivial that do not requires a lot of knowledge and time like...converting some themes.

IMO my theme is similar: https://melpa.org/#/sculpture-themes

That's pretty, thanks for sharing. I like the github page and that it has a lot of examples: https://github.com/precompute/sculpture-themes

Thank you!

The colors fall into a common trap of looking fine when presented in rainbow order but where distant colors are actually extremely similar so as to be difficult to differentiate. Because the colors are all warm (red-leaning) and pastel (un-intense), the magenta and red have become too same-y for my eyes. If they aren't side-by-side, I can't tell which one is which immediately without effort.

I noticed this too. Also, for a so-called “high-contrast” colour scheme, this palette has little contrast, imo

It's obviously not high contrast in any respect. It's rather high end of low contrast. Medium contrast, we could say. But it sadly only attends to contrast between foreground and background and seems to completely ignore contrast between foreground elements.

I took a recent go at designing a good terminal color scheme and ended up with:

https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes#aardvark-b...

The goal of this theme is that:

    colors are fairly natural
    background and black are distinct
    grays are naturally ordered avoiding full black
    light and dark colors are distinct from each other
    all colors look good on background, black, dark gray, gray, white

I think this looks really good, but I think I'd have trouble telling orange and red apart, especially if they were text colors next to each other.

The dark themed code highlighting does not have enough contrast. Those colors need to be brighter.

This is intentional because the colors are meant to replicate the effect of analog ink on paper. Ink on paper is not emissive the way that LCD/OLED screens are, so I have strayed away from colors that are only possible on screens.

That said there are a million other color schemes out there :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com