; 1993-02-01 --- started with emacs
Emacs is the second most important digital tool for me (the most important is bash). This is 29 years now, probably surpassed only by vi, since I changed shells from sh to ksh to tcsh to bash. So emacs has been important for a very long time. Recently I have increased my tinkering after a very long hiatus. I changed to straight as the emacs package manager, and I replaced helm/swiper with selectrum/consult.
Since early in my usage of emacs I had set to a somewhat dark theme, combined with 7x13bold and later terminus fonts. I transported my settings through the venerable .Xdefaults file.
! ~/.Xdefaults Emacs*foreground: White Emacs*background: Midnightblue Emacs*backgroundMode: dark Emacs*pointerColor: Gold Emacs*cursorColor: Gold ! Emacs*Font: 7x13bold Emacs*Font: -*-terminus-*-*-*--14-*-*-*-*-*-*-15
Experimenting with sway without xwayland lead me to compile emacs 29 from sources. The configure option --with-pgtk will create a build capable of running under wayland. However, I needed to transport the information about colors and fonts differently. Which is not a big deal, but it got me experimenting again. For some reason "Midnightblue" nowadays looks much brighter than on the old monitors with their bulky glass tubes. Remember those? I tried the "deeper-blue" theme, which is much darker, but which is not good enough in contrast for me. Dark on very dark is just not cutting it. Black text on black background is only good on my keyboard. Enter modus.
From following the emacs folks[a] I had come across the modus themes, which are carefully created by Protesilaos Stavrou[b]. I tried to load it once some time ago, and it looked so different that I switched back after like 2 minutes. Sorry Prot! But today I gave it another try.
; ~/.emacs.d/init.el
(use-package modus-themes
:straight (modus-themes :type git :flavor melpa :branch "main" :host gitlab :repo "protesilaos/modus-themes")
:init
(setq modus-themes-italic-constructs t
modus-themes-bold-constructs t
modus-themes-region '(bg-only no-extend))
(modus-themes-load-themes)
:config
(modus-themes-load-vivendi)
)
(custom-set-faces
'(default ((t (:family "JetBrains Mono" :foundry "JB" :slant normal :weight normal :height 113 :width normal))))
'(cursor ((t (:background "gold")))))
Oh, this theme sure is dark. Maybe the Midnightblue wasn't that bad after all? The intentional lack of green hues is somewhat unusual for me, since I can distinguish green and red well. I have made a point to not change the defaults unless something is clearly annoying me. Of course emacs now looks very unfamiliar, but heck. I'll give it a try for a week and see, how I fare.
The last time I made the "try for a week"-experiment was the change from fvwm2 to xmonad (and a little later to i3). It took like an hour and I never looked back. So I am somewhat optimistic.
Thanks to the folks, who make emacs a reality, and to Prot for the themes, to Irreal for writing about so many things emacsy, and to whoever is running planet emacs.
Cheers,
~ew