pallor is yet another syntax highlighting color scheme. Why another color scheme? Because color schemes are really really subjective and eventually I'm sure everyone tries to make their own (unless they find one that they think is perfect already). This is my attempt to do so. After some amount of messing around with other schemes, I now use pallor exclusively.
Several samples are shown in SAMPLES.md, but here's a good one from C, which is basically my number one priority for any theme.
pallor is a dark low-constrast color scheme with an especially pale background (#383838). In this regard, it is heavily derivative of zenburn. If you like zenburn's "alien fruit salad" feel, you might also find pallor appealing. Where zenburn has a lot of yellows and oranges, I generally prefer a lot of blues and greens, so pallor's look is slightly cooler in temperature. See COLORS.md for more details on the pallor colors.
pallor aims for as few colors as possible (as of writing, there are only five non-gray foreground colors). This ensures that the colors are easy to distinguish. One of the things I didn't like about zenburn was that there were a lot of colors that were really similar. If they weren't side by side, I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart, so the distinction between them became meaningless. pallor tries to make this a complete non-issue.
It makes as little use of bold/italic as possible, since your preferred font might not have that face (especially bitmap fonts). It also makes minimal use of background coloring - this type of highlighting stands out in the extreme and I think it should be used very sparingly. As of writing, the only scope that uses background highlighting is invalid.
If you use an editor that is compatible with TextMate's .tmTheme format, just drop pallor.tmTheme into your editor. Unfortunately, I don't have any other syntax highlighting formats; ports are welcome.
If you want to edit pallor's colors, the basic process is simple. Edit colors.json to change the colors you don't like. You can add new highlight colors under the colors object, and then refer to them in the various keys below (each key corresponds to a group of scopes in the template). This lets you define a color once and refer to it many times. The values above the colors object tend to only get used once (various shades of gray, and special background highlights), so they aren't bound to any convenient names.
Make sure that all the keys correspond to valid values (including the name and uuid). If they don't then <no value> will be left in their place, and the angle brackets will give an XML parsing error. Then use jgtr to compile the template like so:
$ jgtr -t pallor.tmTheme.tmpl.plist -d colors.json -o pallor.tmThemeIf you want to edit pallor's structure (ie what color corresponds to what scopes), you'll need to edit the raw plist (which is an awful experience), or acquire a means of converting json to plist. I use SerializedDataConverter. You'll want to work with either pallor.tmTheme.tmpl.plist or pallor.tmTheme.tmpl.json. Once you've edited the plist to your heart's content (or edited the JSON and converted it back to plist), invoke jgtr as above to generate the new theme.
I use pandoc to write stuff, so I've also included an experimental CSS file for highlighting pandoc-generated HTML. A template is also provided, so you can regenerate the CSS after changing the colors. I haven't tested this, so let me know if stuff doesn't work. I also have a CSS file for CodeRay-generated HTML with optional table-based line numbers (which I use in lannoc), and a matching template.
pallor has first-class support for a handful of TextMate grammars: C Improved, GoSublime and Markdown Extended. Those happen to be the languages I use, so I care a lot about supporting them. (Notice how none of those grammars are TextMate defaults, they're all improved in some way.)
I also have some behavior specialized for the standard TextMate JSON grammar, so that keys are highlighted differently from values. See the credits for where I got the idea for JSON, it's a real hell of a hack. I'm particularly concerned about its stability, so if your JSON is coming out all blue, you should open an issue ASAP. Right now I think it goes 7 or 8 nested objects deep, which is good enough for me. Honestly the problem is with the TextMate JSON grammar, but I can't be bothered to learn and fix that right now.
If highlighting is less granular than you'd like in a language that you use, PRs are welcome. If highlighting is BORKED in a language (ie this element falls under this group of stuff, yet it's being highlighted under a different group), issues are strongly encouraged. I care about my theme breaking stuff - who knows, someday I'll be programming in that language. However, the problem might be with the TextMate grammar, and not with pallor. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
zenburn for being the best theme I've ever seen (that wasn't written by myself). If I couldn't write my own, I'd use this for the rest of my life and never look back. (Runner-up: Tomorrow Night Eighties.) Many of the colors in pallor are taken straight out of zenburn (and rounded off to be divisible by 8 because yay pretty numbers).
base16 for the idea of using templates to build themes. This lets you separate colors from the scopes they apply to. In fact, the base16-builder script was what inspired me to write jgtr.
Neon for a lot of the scopes used in pallor, particularly the hack to highlight JSON keys. Since TextMate grammars can define arbitrary scopes, the burden is on theme maintainers to include support to highlight those scopes, so thanks for taking away a lot of the grunt work in finding out what scopes I cared about.
MIT/expat, see LICENSE.md.