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Castor Colour Schemes

2020 05 15

I use Castor for most of my Gemini browsing:

Castor Gemini Browser in rust.

I also use AV-98 but as I don't always live in terminal-world and my mouse works fine, I find a GUI browser much more appealing. Castor ships with an example settings file 'castor_settings.toml.example' which you can use to start your own file. If you don't have a settings file (or don't give a value for a particular setting) then Castor will use its built-in defaults.

Castor looks for settings in ~/.config/castor/settings.toml so if you don't have anything there just go ahead and make a blank file. You can also copy the example file into that location, being sure to back up any existing file first!

Next, open settings.toml in your favourite text editor. The first option is self explanatory: it's the URL which will be shown to you first, e.g.:

  [general]
    start_url = "gemini://bleyble.com/"

The next block is to do with colours. Different elements of a Gemini document, such a headings, can be rendered in different colours to help them stand out.

The default colour scheme with Castor is a bit wild for my tastes, so here are a couple of options that you might want to try out...

Colour Schemes

Here are a couple of schemes in cheery reds, blues, and yellows:

Primaries, dark BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#FFC83A"
  h2 = "#E54D4D"
  h3 = "#2E97FF"
  list = "#E5DDDA"
  text = "#E5DDDA"
  background = "#34332E"

Primaries, light BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#E59C00"
  h2 = "#C65151"
  h3 = "#4680B9"
  list = "#435569"
  text = "#435569"
  background = "#E6E5E5"

Next, a retro fantastic mix of CMY shades. Browse Gemini with your best chillwave or synthwave mixtape playing in the background:

Synthwave

  [colors]
    h1 = "#08F6F8"
    h2 = "#FF79D9"
    h3 = "#FEFE55"
    list = "#FEFDFE"
    text = "#FEFDFE"
    background = "#340F2F"

This next one takes after the syntax highlighting of the same name:

Dracula

[colors]
  h1 = "#4EEC76"
  h2 = "#C868A3"
  h3 = "#A785DB"
  list = "#E5E5E6"
  text = "#E5E5E6"
  background = "#282A36"

Monochrome Phosphor

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike modern displays.

Amber-like terminal

[colors]
  h1 = "#F86624"
  h2 = "#F86624"
  h3 = "#F86624"
  list = "#FC9E0F"
  text = "#FC9E0F"
  background = "#230F00"

Green-like terminal

[colors]
  h1 = "#24F866"
  h2 = "#66ff66"
  h3 = "#66ff66"
  list = "#55ff88"
  text = "#55ff88"
  background = "#00230F"

Blue Headings

Blues, dark BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#5085FF"
  h2 = "#639BF1"
  h3 = "#93B1F6"
  list = "#DEDEDE"
  text = "#DEDEDE"
  background = "#3C3D3F"

Blues, light BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#3B5998"
  h2 = "#004687"
  h3 = "#293EA0"
  list = "#3D3C3A"
  text = "#3D3C3A"
  background = "#E4EEEF"

Red headings

Reds, dark BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#FF383A"
  h2 = "#FF432B"
  h3 = "#FF531B"
  list = "#DEDEDE"
  text = "#DEDEDE"
  background = "#3D3C3A"

Reds, light BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#FF383A"
  h2 = "#FF432B"
  h3 = "#FF531B"
  list = "#3D3C3A"
  text = "#3D3C3A"
  background = "#FFF4DC"

Green headings

Greems, dark BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#3AEC58"
  h2 = "#9BF163"
  h3 = "#9BFC63"
  list = "#DEDEDE"
  text = "#DEDEDE"
  background = "#3A3D3C"

Greens, light BG

[colors]
  h1 = "#4AAF44"
  h2 = "#53A270"
  h3 = "#338756"
  list = "#3D3C3A"
  text = "#3D3C3A"
  background = "#DEE1CC"

If you include multiple color schemes, you need to make sure you only have one active block in your settings file at a time. You can comment-out the other colour blocks by adding a # character to the start of each line. Most colour settings except for the background are applied as soon as the next page is loaded. You'll need to restart Castor to see the background colour change.

I hope that a future version will include a setting for preformatted text blocks too ;-)

Heading and List Prefixes

After the colours is a block of options for how different elements are drawn in Castor. The defaults here are mainly to show you how it works but you might not want to have all your lists indicated by flowers ... so you can go ahead and and comment-out each line, e.g.:

  #[characters]
    #h1 = ">"
    #h2 = "))"
    #h3 = "}}}"
    # list = "🌼"

Monospaced vs Variable-Width Fonts

Lastly, everything looks better with a monospaced font IMHO. If things look janky on your system then it's probably because your variable-width font is doing it's thing to make itself look good and breaking some underlying layout in the page. If you switch to monospaced fonts and still find a page which looks all messed up then that's on the author. Probably.

If you're coming from gopherworld then you are probably used to monospaced text already. Go ahead and set everything ready to take-off into monospace:

  [monospace]
    gemini=true
    gopher=true
    finger=true

Some of these settings will need you to close to Castor and restart it so if your changes aren't appearing right away, try doing that ;)

If you want to download a settings file (which works with Castor 0.8.6) which has all the above colour schemes ready to go, here it is:

quokka_castor_settings.toml

If you are looking to build Castor, then installing the following packages should help you get there:

sudo apt install build-essential libssl-dev libgtk-3-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev cargo

Installing cargo will bring in all a lot of the other required dependencies (like rustc, librust-atk-dev, librust-pango-dev, cairo-5c).

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