Protesilaos

Emacs: modus-themes version 5.3.0

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.

5.3.0 on 2026-06-21

The Modus themes are in a stable state. To my mind, they provide the best “default theme” experience across the 40+ original themes I have carefully designed.

Modus is also a platform for making themes for Emacs. There are plenty of derivatives already. I am linking to them through the project’s README.md and am always happy to mention more packages—just let me know.

This version does not include many user-facing changes. Most of my work focused on making internal refinements.

Load the themes through the early-init.el

The Modus themes can now be loaded through the early-init.el file. The idea is to avoid the flash of light that occurs under certain conditions during startup.

This feature is the result of several changes to helper functions, especially those contributing to the modus-themes-generate-palette function that Modus derivatives may be relying on.

Thanks to Steven Allen for an intermediate refinement in pull request 194 and to Mike Olson for another relevant tweak in pull request 199:

Steven’s contribution no longer exists in the code base due to other changes I made, but was still useful at the time.

Both changes are small, meaning that their authors do not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Also thanks to Jacod “Jake” Gordon for reminding me to apply one of the new functions to the org-habit faces. This was done in issue 197: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/197.

The underline for widget fields has the correct colour

Relevant faces use the palette entry for border (invoke the command modus-themes-preview-colors or modus-themes-preview-colors-current to view the entries in a theme’s palette).

A popular package that makes use of widget.el widgets is notmuch.

Thanks to ukiran03 for the contribution, which was done in pull request 193: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/193. The change is small, meaning that ukiran03 does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

A palette can now have a bg-popup entry

This gives users and derivative themes the option to pick a suitable value for popup interfaces, such as those of the company and corfu packages.

Thanks to aikrahguzar for making this suggestion in issue 70 of my ef-themes repository (the ef-themes are built on top of the modus-themes since Modus version 5.0.0, Ef version 2.0.0): https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes/issues/70.

Support for faces or packages

  • lin by Protesilaos.
  • pulsar by Protesilaos.
  • institution-calendar by Protesilaos.
  • markdown-ts-mode by Rahul Martim Juliato and StĂ©phane Marks.
  • trust-manager by Eshel Yaron.
  • typst-ts-mode by Ziqi Yang. Thanks to Pranshu Sharma for suggesting its inclusion in issue 208: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/208.
  • new elfeed faces since the maintenance of the project was assumed by Daniel Mendler, Karthik Chikmagalur, and Ihor Radchenko. To this end, thanks to Steven Allen for pull request 217 that added the elfeed-show-* faces: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/217

Internal refinements to the modus-themes-with-colors macro

It now correctly handles the order of default palette colours and user-defined palette overrides. Thanks to JD Smith for the contribution in pull request 191: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/191.

The change is small, meaning that JD does not need to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

The multiple-cursors are fine even when a bar is used

When the cursor-type is configured to be a bar, the fake cursors produced by the multiple-cursors package will still look right. Thanks to Elias Gabriel Perez for the change to the mc/cursor-bar-face in pull request 213: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/213.

The blink-matching-paren-offscreen is the same as show-paren-match

This is for thematic consistency. Thanks to Troy Brown for suggesting this change in issue 209: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/issues/209.

Get vc-annotate look right

The built-in vc-annotate command relies on a user option to read color values. We cannot handle this nicely at the theme level. Users need to write their own configuration like this:

(defun my-modus-vc-annotate (&rest _)
  (modus-themes-with-colors
    (setq vc-annotate-background-mode nil)
    (setq vc-annotate-very-old-color fg-dim)
    (setq vc-annotate-color-map
          `(( 20. . ,red)
            ( 40. . ,red-cooler)
            ( 60. . ,red-warmer)
            ( 80. . ,yellow-warmer)
            (100. . ,yellow)
            (120. . ,yellow-cooler)
            (140. . ,green-warmer)
            (160. . ,green)
            (180. . ,green-cooler)
            (200. . ,cyan-cooler)
            (220. . ,cyan-warmer)
            (240. . ,cyan)
            (260. . ,blue-warmer)
            (280. . ,blue)
            (300. . ,blue-cooler)
            (320. . ,blue-intense)
            (340. . ,magenta-cooler)
            (360. . ,fg-dim)))))

(with-eval-after-load 'vc-annotate
  (my-modus-vc-annotate)
  (add-hook 'enable-theme-functions #'my-modus-vc-annotate))

[ The above code is relevant as of this writing. Though remember that I do not keep older publications up-to-date. The only source of truth is the manual of the Modus themes. ]

Two old user options are no longer needed

The user options modus-themes-completions and modus-themes-prompts are obsolete. They used to be relevant before the introduction of palette overrides.

Rewrote large parts of the manual

I did it for clarity, but also to remove notes that were specific to older versions of Emacs.

Many new ERT tests for the project

I have written many tests. They do not cover every single function, though the plan is to do that eventually. These tests are important to ensure that Modus is a solid platform for making derivative themes.

Much of this was done live: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-04-10-emacs-spontaneous-live-modus-themes/.

Thanks to Benjamin Kästner for a couple of tweaks to a relevant macro in the tests’ file. This was done in pull request 212, with further changes by me: https://github.com/protesilaos/modus-themes/pull/212.

Links to projects related to Modus

In the README.md I now mention projects that are related to the Modus themes, such as derivative Emacs themes, but also ports for other editors.

There is also a link to my modus-themes-exporter package, which I developed during a live stream:

Git commits

git shortlog 5.2.0..5.3.0 --summary --numbered
    123	Protesilaos
     2	Benjamin Kästner
     2	Steven Allen
     1	Elias Gabriel Perez
     1	JD Smith
     1	Mike Olson
     1	ukiran03
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