Emacs immaterial-theme

Note: for good results in a pure terminal environment, consider installing Emacs 26 and enable truecolors in your terminal.

Immaterial is an emacs color theme that comes in two flavors: immateral-dark and immaterial-light.

In its infancy it was loosely based on the principles of Google's Material design, but that's all immaterial ...

Since then it has evolved to become a theme focused on readability and a sober amount of coloring; enough to help you quickly grasp syntactical structure and identify key elements without bombarding your senses with an undue amount of colors (a lot of themes seem to take a "more is more" approach to coloring, ending up in a christmas tree where no element stands out from the rest).

It is built from a number of "coloring building blocks". Their use is summarized below. For full details, refer to the the code.

• background: used for the background of buffers, modeline, etc.

  Comes in three flavors: background-primary, background-on, background-off. Most of the background will be colored using background-primary. background-on is used for highlighting or attracting attention (such as the active modeline, search candidates, etc). background-off is used to tone down parts of the screen (such as the inactive modeline in a split frame with several buffers).

• foreground: used for the majority of the text.

  Comes in three flavors: foreground-primary, foreground-secondary, foreground-tertiary with falling degree of use in the theme.

• primary, secondary, tertiary: these groups of colors are accent colors that are used mostly to highlight syntactical elements (in code) or other notable text elements (such as headings, links, etc). Each comes in three forms to give some variation to the accent: "plain", "low contrast", "high contrast" (contrast being relative to the background):

  • primary, primary-hi, primary-lo:
    • code use: keywords, constants
    • text use: headings
  • secondary, secondary-hi, secondary-lo:
    • code use: types, variables
    • text use: code/verbatim elements, timestamps
  • tertiary, tertiary-hi, tertiary-lo
    • code: strings
    • text use: links

• some additional colors for specific types of highlighting:

  • discrete: for less pronounced text (code comments, line numbers).
  • error: for highlighting erroneous code.
  • warning: for highlighting suspicious code. Also used to highlight search matches.
  • cursor: the color of the cursor.
  • vertical-border: the color of the vertical line that separates windows in a frame.
  • modeline-active-fg: foreground color for active buffer modeline.
  • modeline-active-bg: background color for active buffer modeline.
  • modeline-inactive-fg: foreground color for inactive buffer modelines.
  • modeline-inactive-bg: background color for inactive buffer modelines.
  • diff-{added,changed,removed}: diff highlighting
  • diff-{added,changed,removed}-refined: higher-granularity diff highlighting

All colors are defined in the default immaterial-color-alist (tip: enable rainbow-mode when exploring).

Each color can be overridden through the immaterial-color-override-alist variable, which overrides the defaults in the immaterial-color-alist. As an example, to provide a different primary color palette:

(setq immaterial-color-override-alist
  '(("background-primary" . ((dark  . "#000000") (light . "#eeffdd")))
    ("background-on"      . ((dark  . "#003300") (light . "#ddffaa")))
    ;; override 'primary' only for dark theme
    ("primary"            . ((dark  . "#80cbc4")))
    ;; override 'warning' only for light theme
    ("warning"            . ((light . "#ed4079")))))

Note: the Material color tool is useful when experimenting with color palettes and variants of a certain color. For dark themes, less saturated colors (200 and less) from the color palette improves readability.

Note: emacs rainbow-mode comes in handy for highlighting each hex color being edited in you emacs init file.

Screenshots

immaterial-dark

immaterial-light

Install

• From MELPA (or MELPA stable) via:

    M-x package-install RET immaterial-theme
  
    ;; load dark theme
    (load-theme 'immaterial-dark t)
  
    ;; ... or load light theme
    (load-theme 'immaterial-light t)
  

• Via use-package:

    (use-package immaterial-theme
      :ensure t
      :config
      (load-theme 'immaterial-dark t))
  

• By adding immaterial-theme.el to ~/.emacs.d/themes and the following to your init.el:

    (add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes")
    (load-theme 'immaterial-dark t)