Aims of Theme

Lambda-themes is a collection of four higher and lower contrast light and dark themes. The color palette is limited, and organized according to function and salience. Here I largely agree with Nicolas Rougier that attentional constraints matter when thinking about the color palette. Lambda-themes tries to use color in a way to provide for a reasonable compromise between aesthetics and readability.

In general the theme aims to use as few highly distinct colors as possible without crossing over into full “monochrome” territory. It also means that the themes use various devices other than foreground face color to capture meaningful differences in text. Different text weights are used throughout, as are subtle differences in background coloring. Colored headlines are largely avoided.

Screenshots

Splash

Colors

Note that I use SF Mono for my font here, and rainbow-delimiters to colorize parens. The mode-line/status-line is from lambda-line.

Installation

Lambda-themes is not yet on MELPA. In the meantime to use this package you’ll have to clone or otherwise download the repo and put it into your load path. Here’s a basic way of setting it up using use-package and straight.

(use-package lambda-themes
  :straight (:type git :host github :repo "lambda-emacs/lambda-themes") 
  :custom
  (lambda-themes-set-italic-comments t)
  (lambda-themes-set-italic-keywords t)
  (lambda-themes-set-variable-pitch t) 
  :config
  ;; load preferred theme 
  (load-theme 'lambda-light))

Options

See M-x customize-group lambda-themes for the full list of options.

• Set evil-cursor colors
• Set italic comments or keywords
• Set use of variable pitch in headlines, etc.
• Set a custom color palette.

Acknowledgments

• The colors for this theme have been inspired by Nicolas Rougier’s work on elegant-emacs and nano-emacs, but has evolved with some ideas and colors borrowed from material colors, solarized and nord, as well as color design aided by coolers.co and the classic Werner’s Nomenclature. The faded themes are variations on my bespoke-themes design.
• The function for loading the specific color theme is taken from humanoid-themes.