The Art Of Not Asking Why

Years ago, when I started the old blog¹, I discovered Solarized.

I liked it. The colors were beautiful and worked for me, but eventually I switched to the Gotham theme in Emacs, which, if you take a look, is not much different — just a bit darker. I stayed with this theme for a long time, tweaking it a bit after a trip to New Mexico.

When I received my Mac and started working on it at home, I enjoyed its automatic switching between dark and light themes. At the same time, Prot started coming out with more of his excellent Ef Themes, and I adopted ef-reverie for my light theme and ef-night for my dark one (once again, if you look at the images, you’d see they’re not far off from Solarized, especially my choice of a light theme).

This has been the state of affairs until the beginning of this week, when I “found” Solarized again. I discovered Prot himself was heavily influenced by Solarized, and he discussed it several times on his blog. Here’s part of his background story for his project Prot16:

My starting point for developing a colour scheme was Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized. A true masterpiece. I thus settled on a method of using a 16-colour palette that consists of 8 base values and 8 accents. As with Solarized, the themes would have to be able to transition from ’light’ to ‘dark’ environments with minor alteration to the mapping of colours (though not the values themselves).

Prot’s quest is an interesting one. Like me, he enjoyed Solarized, but eventually decided the colors were not contrasting enough for his taste. His reaction was to create his well-known Modus themes, which, along with his Ef-themes and Prot16, set new theming standards for Emacs.

Meanwhile, I have had the other issue since childhood:

I’ve never liked harsh contrast for this reason. As a matter of fact, a more “gentle” contrasting theme is one of the reasons I like working in Emacs. My website and my wiki are a result of these preferences. The black text on the beige background is comfortable on my eyes. Enough contrast to read, but not enough to burn text into my vision, as many dark modes out there do.

While Prot’s ef-themes offer softer contrast (I didn’t check, but it does seem so visually) which I find excellent, I decided to try out bbatsov’s Solarized for Emacs, which I didn’t know about in the past when I first picked up this theme for Emacs — the official Emacs port is not as good in my opinion.

I’ve learned a couple of things I wasn’t aware of. For starters, you can have many variations of this theme, even though the main 16 colors are still preserved. It makes sense when you think about it: one person can choose Solarized’s red (#dc322f in hex) as an emphasis, while another can select its yellow (#b58900) or orange (#cb4b16), for example. Webpages and Emacs take it a step further, as certain texts can be bold or italicized, with solid underlines or dashed ones, etc. All of those changes take place without touching the colors themselves.

Solarized also helps me with a certain itch I’ve had for a couple of months: a dark theme for my blog. I know most of you read my posts in your RSS reader, hopefully with a theme you enjoy, so this won’t matter much. For me, how my site looks and is styled is important, and getting there is fun.