As many of you know, my idea of a theme is to set the background to “oldlace” and the cursor to red. For the rest of it, I just take what Emacs gives me. That sounds pretty haphazard but it works out pretty well. It has enough contrast to be easy to read without searing my eyeballs and has enough syntax highlighting to be useful without being overpowering.
Prot (Protesilaos Stavrou) has a much more refined sense for these things. He considers what colors go well to together and things like contrast levels. Just the oposite of my “do with me what you will” approach. Nevertheless, I mostly don’t bother much with formally defined themes although I do occasionally like to take a look at them.
The reason for this post is Prot’s latest release of his Doric Themes. They’re sort of minimalist, like my non-theme theme but still very nice looking if you don’t want your Emacs screen to look like an arcade. The doric-almond variation is, in particular, very similar to my color scheme. Mine has a little more contrast: the foreground text is a bit darker and the keywords in my code buffers are a blue that’s slightly brighter than doric-almond’s light green. Still, it’s a theme that I’d be comfortable with if I hadn’t taken the easy way.
Some people have multiple themes and change them according to the time of day, their mood, the phase of the moon, or whatever. I’d hate that probably for the same reason that I don’t do well with trying to use different editors: I’d always be confused as to what’s what.
If you’re looking for a minimalist theme and my method seems too minimal, take a look at Prot’s Doric Themes. There are several variations in both light and dark mode.