Version 1 Rewrite

[cideM]

I've created a branch on which I'm reimplementing large parts of this color scheme. It will keep its overall brownish vibe from the Rams notebook but it'll be a bit less brown. Here's what I have in mind:

• [ ] Pay more attention to impaired color vision
• [ ] Better constrast so working in flux/redshift is easier
• [ ] Remove all options... I think a color scheme should just have a good overall vision and concept and then come omakase. It's really hard to make sure that all options are compatible to each other
• [ ] Remove the colortemplate dependency. I read in an issue that there are ideas to "Rewrite Colortemplate in Vim9 script." and as a Neovim user I'd like to keep things compatible with both. Also I think I'm not getting enough value out of it. There are a lot of options for templating.
• [ ] More support for 3rd party plugins and highlight groups not covered by the current version

All of these are just ideas so far. I'll post updates and screenshots in this issue. Feel free to chime in! All feedback is appreciated.

One of the most important things I'm playing around with right now are comments. I really don't t like the orange I have on master and I'm considering giving them a certain background shade. Only italic is also an option but that's easy to miss maybe? Although it would have a certain minimalistic appeal if comments had only italic text and nothing else 🥥

[cideM]

[eemed]

I tested the v2 branch here are my experiences:

• I really liked the blue color on Search. Infact I even linked PMenuSel and Visual to Search.
• I liked the old background color but after watching the new one for about 5 mins it seems good too.
• Comments are good I always wanted them to be significantly different than other text
• Statusline is better with dark background
• Would still like an option to change LineNr and SignColumn background to something different than Normal
• I dont like the bold on WarningMsg and ErrorMsg. Also I don't know if you changed the colors or not but they seem to really disappear to the background.
• Again don't know if this is about the background but diff colors were the best thing about this colorscheme when I started I would like them back if possible. Especially diffAdded blends into the background.
• Todo is great.

Some further ideas since we are rewriting:

• I would like to add bold or something to Keyword. But this is the same as Constant so we would need to manage that somehow
• MatchParen should be something more significant

Also the previous emphasized Comment orange was beautiful maybe you can reuse it.

[cideM]

Thanks for the feedback!

Also the previous emphasized Comment orange was beautiful maybe you can reuse it.

This won't work because it really doesn't work when using redshift/flux/nightshift

I dont like the bold on WarningMsg and ErrorMsg

Hm yeah it's a bit overkill I think I'll change that back to non bold

MatchParen should be something more significant

Ideas? I personally like it subtle, maybe there's some nice middle ground here

Especially diffAdded blends into the background.

I'll take a look at the contrast ratios for these

I really liked the blue color on Search

You mean the purple from the last screenshots on master? I will have to play around with a color for search that also fits the palette. A dash of color might work well. But then again someone else also mentioned that they didn't like the bright selection white. Maybe I can use a color for selections and search to unify all sorts of "select this thing and make it stand out"

[eemed]

You mean the purple from the last screenshots on master?

Yea it probably was purple in code, but looked blue to me.

Ideas? I personally like it subtle, maybe there's some nice middle ground here

I linked MatchParen to the Search purple, but thats probably too much if you want it subtle. Maybe just use a darker background with normal foreground color? I usually search pairs using this and usually miss them if only the foreground is changed.

Maybe I can use a color for selections and search to unify all sorts of "select this thing and make it stand out"

This is exactly what I did in my configs with the previous Search purple and it looked great.

[cideM]

I brought back the purple, it's also much better for red shift as the orangy/salmony color I had before

Also made diffAdd a bit greener

I would like to add bold or something to Keyword. But this is the same as Constant so we would need to manage that somehow

It's tricky because strings are also bold. I'm not super happy with that but not differentiating strings from the rest of the code can be a bit annoying. But maybe it's better to highlight other syntax than strings. Or maybe there's something else that could be done about strings. Different lightness might work

[cideM]

Here's blue comments and colored sidebar. The purple doesn't look nice for comments. Having comments and sidebar with a background can make for A LOT of backgrounds

Comments just italic and bold but normal color

and here with a darker shade of normal FG

[eemed]

Hmm... The comments were the best with different background. I would keep them for now.

Maybe try to use the purple in selections as you suggested.

About the keyword highlighting: Maybe like you said keywords bold and strings slightly different foreground color. Maybe even just italic the keywords and keep strings bold? I think the first would look better.

[cideM]

The problem about comments with background is that there's a lot of background when the sidebar (signcolumn linenr) also has a background

[eemed]

Yea im experimenting currently. The second problem is that the background disappears with cursorline. Here is some of my experiments to give you some kind of direction about my ideas:

function! YuiV2()
    highlight! Search guifg=#5438dc guibg=#dcd7f9
    highlight! IncSearch guifg=#dcd7f9 guibg=#5438dc
    highlight! link Visual Search
    highlight! link MatchParen Search
    highlight! link PmenuSel Search
    highlight! link PmenuThumb PmenuSel

    highlight! link SpecialComment Comment
    highlight! Comment guibg=NONE guifg=#007575
    " highlight! Comment guibg=NONE guifg=#E44C22

    " highlight! Normal guibg=#efeae5
    " highlight! Cursorline guibg=#eae0d6 guifg=none
    highlight! LineNr guibg=#eae0d6
    highlight! CursorLineNr guibg=#eae0d6
    highlight! link SignColumn LineNr

    highlight! WarningMsg gui=NONE
    highlight! Error gui=NONE
    highlight! Constant guifg=#85766F gui=NONE
    highlight! Keyword gui=bold

    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignError ErrorMsg
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignWarning WarningMsh
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignInformation Search
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignHint Search

    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultError NormalFloat
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultWarning NormalFloat
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultInformation NormalFloat
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultHint NormalFloat

    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsUnderlineError SpellBad
    highlight! link LspDiagnosticsUnderlineWarning DiffChange
    highlight! LspDiagnosticsUnderlineInformation cterm=NONE gui=NONE
    highlight! LspDiagnosticsUnderlineHint cterm=NONE gui=NONE

    " highlight! link Visual Search
    " highlight! link SpecialComment Comment
    " highlight! link NonText SpecialKey
    " highlight! link MatchParen Search

    " highlight! link PmenuSel Search
    " highlight! link PmenuThumb PmenuSel

    highlight! link texStatement Constant
    highlight! link texTypeStyle Constant
    highlight! link texBeginEnd Constant
    highlight! link texBeginEndName NONE
    highlight! link texSection Constant
    highlight! link texCmd Constant
    highlight! link texStyleItal mkdItalic

    highlight! xmlTagName gui=bold

    " highlight! link Todo WarningMsg
    " highlight! Keyword gui=bold
endfunction
autocmd ColorScheme yui call YuiV2()

[cideM]

Here's another issue with comments that have backgrounds

Tabs in comments

[eemed]

I also had alot of problems with CursorLine but it should resolve itself by not linking anything to Normal. I normally don't use linenumbers on so thats why the background is so important on the SignColumn. However I sometimes use toggle them on and would like the linenumber background to be consistent with the signcolumn.

[eemed]

What do you think about the blue/purple visual selection and psel?

[cideM]

I actually mentioned that a few comments ago it was just obscured by all the screenshots. I think I already pushed something that uses blue/purple (also called blurple) again. I just haven't added it for visual yet. I'll have to see if that makes hlsearch difficult. I'm part of a minority of users who doesn't auto deactivate hlsearch upon cursor movement and so for me it might be useful to differntiate visual select from hlsearch. But maybe that's not actually super useful.

[eemed]

you havent pushed anything recently. latest commit is 6 days ago.

[cideM]

Another comment idea. Has to be bold for it to at least be AA contrast

[eemed]

That looks good. But if we link Visual to blue also there will be so much of it.

[cideM]

The all purple version

[eemed]

Yeah the comments add too much purple.

• If we want to make blurple the selection color, comments wouldnt make much sense.

[cideM]

My current idea is to go back to not having the sidebar colored. This theme was inspired by a paper notebook which also doesn't have any special sidebar. And then instead of adding options I'll add a FAQ with snippets that show people how to get a colored sidebar by linking highlight groups. This empowers people to learn a bit about Vim colorschemes, is very flexible and doesn't put more burned on this colorscheme.

Then I can give comments a background again (with some other change the tab issue seems gone) and even make them non-italic. After all, they're already set apart by their bg color.

This would free up italics for e.g., identifiers.

[eemed]

Yeah that looks better. The only problem with background comments is that if you use cursorline the color doesnt immediately tell that you are in a comment. But thats just a small inconvenience

[eemed]

Now that comments are no longer italic. and strings have a different foreground instead of bold. What would you want to use bold and italic for?

I would like to all language constructs to be bold, but don't really know what italic is good for. Currently im pretty happy with the theme and my modifications have reduced to

highlight! link SpecialComment Comment
highlight! Statement gui=bold
highlight! SignColumn guibg=#EBE2E0

Lsp settings are off however. Floating windows have error colored text and some signs have no color. Im still using these

highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignError ErrorMsg
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignWarning WarningMsg
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignInformation Search
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsSignHint Search

highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultError NormalFloat
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultWarning NormalFloat
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultInformation NormalFloat
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsDefaultHint NormalFloat

highlight! link LspDiagnosticsUnderlineError SpellBad
highlight! link LspDiagnosticsUnderlineWarning DiffChange
highlight! LspDiagnosticsUnderlineInformation cterm=NONE gui=NONE
highlight! LspDiagnosticsUnderlineHint cterm=NONE gui=NONE

I don't know if those highlight groups are the final ones in neovim 0.5 but they seem to work for me currently.

Cursorline has also some weird things happening. Overriding everything on the line. I fixed it with the following:

highlight! clear CursorLine
highlight! CursorLine guibg=#ffffff

Still not sure about the comment though. The background version seems to have a lot of problems, with cursorline and this is the commit window currently The backgrounds just switch along the way. Maybe we should do some different colored comments and use just foreground?

[cideM]

Better visibility for tab line Differentiate hlsearch and visual by using a shade of purple

[cideM]

:wave: I've done some reflecting and came to a few conclusions.

I will abandon the idea of a rewrite with breaking changes. I'm always annoyed by breaking changes without a really good reason. As it stands, the V1 version I'm proposing here isn't some scientific and artistic miracle that would warrant that. I'll therefore keep all options the way they are right now so one using this color scheme has to change anything.

I'll port the improvements made from the v2 branch to master. This includes additional highlight groups for third party plugins and any obvious improvements to existing colors.

I might keep some tweaks to foreground and background, depending on the contrast of the current FG and BG colors. But nothing drastic.

Lastly, I'll replace the colortemplate dependency with a light-weight, custom solution. Probably a single Nix shebang file using Haskell. That way I can use http://hackage.haskell.org/package/colour-2.3.5 to mix, dark and blend colors, and so on. Manually doing this kind of shading is tedious.

[cideM]

It's a few hundred lines of easily manageable Vim script so I've even abandoned the idea of any custom light weight templating thing.