Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: modus-themes version 4.7.0

I just published the latest stable release of the Modus themes. The change log entry is reproduced further below. For any questions, you are welcome to contact me. I will now work to apply these same changes to emacs.git, so please wait a little longer for the updates to trickle down to you.

4.7.0 on 2025-04-17

This release introduces many subtle stylistic tweaks to the “tinted”, “deuteranopia”, and “tritanopia” theme variants.

The modus-themes-list-colors command uses a tabulated list

This command and its modus-themes-list-colors-current variant help users see the colour values and semantic palette mappings defined by the given theme. In the past, their buffer was designed in the same spirit as that of the command list-faces-display, whereas now it is like the buffer of the command list-packages. Concretely, users may now sort by column. Do M-x describe-mode while in that buffer to learn about the available commands and their respective key bindings.

The “tinted” themes have slightly different colours

The overall feel of the modus-operandi-tinted and modus-vivendi-tinted themes is the same as before. Though in a side-by-side comparison between the old and new versions reveals lots of subtle differences. The general idea is to make the themes a bit more consistent by tweaking the foreground values to be more harmonious in combination with their background.

The “deuteranopia” themes are more consistently blue and yellow

These are the modus-operandi-deuteranopia and modus-vivendi-deuteranopia, which are optimised for users with red-green colour deficiency. In the past, these themes used blue and yellow hues wherever a concept of “success” versus “failure” had to be established. This approach is more generalised now, to include programming syntax highlighting and many other contexts. In short, the themes are more blue+yellow, while retaining their original feel.

The “tritanopia” themes are more consistently red and cyan

As above, the modus-operandi-tritanopia and modus-vivendi-tritanopia themes, which are optimised for users with blue-yellow colour deficiency, use a red+cyan palette in more places. Overall, they feel like they did before, only they are more consistent.

Miscellaneous

  • Extended support for the icomplete faces that are coming in Emacs version 31.

  • Added support for treemacs faces, courtesy of Rahul Juliato in pull request 121: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/121. Rahul has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

  • Added support for the tldr package.

  • Extended support for adoc-mode. Thanks to Leilei332 for the contribution in pull request 137: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/137. The change is within the ~15-line limit, meaning that the author does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

  • Added support for my spacious-padding package, specifically the faces it can use when the spacious-padding-subtle-mode-line user option is enabled.

  • Added support for the howm package.

  • Extended support to the new faces of the transient package. More specifically, all those faces use the same colour for key bindings because the idea of colour coding keys (e.g. light yellow means something different than dark blue) does not work in practice when considering accessibility. Such semantics should not be limited to differences in colour: they should also have distinct indicators, such as ASCII or Unicode characters.

  • Revised the avy package’s faces to only use one coloured background. The multiple coloured backgrounds have been a perennial problem for our accessibility requirements and have made the themes needlessly more complex just to support an edge case. With this simplified style, avy continues to work fine: it simply is less flamboyant. Other interfaces with avy-like model of interaction, such as optional extensions to the vertico and corfu packages, have these same changes, in the interest of consistency.

  • Update the meow sample configuration in the manual. This package is not directly supported at the theme level because (i) I do not use it and (ii) it is very hard for an outsider to it to trigger the display of all of its faces in the right context. Without seeing how all of them look together, I cannot come up with a reliable design. The manual offers a “good enough” approximation.

  • Broadened the support of the vterm faces to include the “bright” colours, while updating those that were already covered. Thanks to Edgar Vincent for informing me that some of the vterm faces were changed a while ago. This was done in issue 317 on the GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/issues/317.

  • Revised the org-column-title face to inherit the fixed-pitch face if the user option modus-themes-mixed-fonts is non-nil. This user option makes it possible to have a buffer with proportionately spaced fonts (such as by enabling variable-pitch-mode), while keeping spacing-sensitive elements, like tables and code blocks, in a monospaced font.

    Thanks to pedro-nonfree for bringing this matter to my attention in issue 129: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/129.

  • Simplified the helper function modus-themes--retrieve-palette-value to make it more efficiently. Thanks to Basil L. Contovounesios for the contribution in merge request 60 on the GitLab mirror: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/-/merge_requests/60.

  • Reworded the minibuffer prompt of the modus-themes-list-colors command.

  • Made Ivy and IDO subdirectories and “virtual” buffers easier to tell apart from matching text highlights.

  • Included coverage for the auto-dim-other-buffers-hide-face of the package auto-dim-other-buffers

  • Covered the built-in abbrev-table-name face.

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