2010-12-30

color theming with emacs 24

The emacs development team is hard at work on emacs 24. As far as I know, there is no planned date for it yet. I'll write more about all the new cool things when we're a bit closer to the release date, but I'd like to highlight emacs 24 color-theming already, as it's an area people outside the core development theme should be able to contribute to as well.

Here at Emacs-fu, we already discussed color-theming and in particular the zenburn color theme; this was all based on the color-theme-package. While being popular, there were a few problems with that package, which is why emacs-24 comes with a new scheme for doing this.

The current development versions of emacs ship with a few themes (tango, tango-dark and wheatgrass), which you can activate with M-x load-theme. It would be great to include some more color themes, and to encourage this, emacs maintainer Chong Yidong has written the GNU Emacs Theme Generator (currently in bèta), which helps you in the process of making a simple theme. This tool currently only support changing colors, and not e.g. the boldness or slant, but it's a nice way to get started, and to immediately see the results.

For more complex theming, there is M-x customize-create-theme; however, that is built on the (in my opinion) cumbersome customize-interface, so I'll probably start by creating a basic theme with the web tool, and then edit it by hand. If you design some attractive color theme and would like to propose it for inclusion in emacs 24, you can send it to emacs-devel.

9 comments:

Ferk said...

I've been using this one I made quite some time ago: http://www.uco.es/~q22cavaf/darkclean-theme.el

Unknown said...

nice to hear that color-theme will be builtin with emacs-24. I wrote a little wrapper arund color-theme to make the customization of all the different faces a lot simpler, if you are intrested: https://github.com/senny/theme-roller.el

krish said...

If there is any tool that generate emacs color theme from textmate, that will be great. That should be doable. Someone needs to try though.

oluc said...

It seems the theme generator now supports bold/italic/etc.

Anonymous said...

hi..sorry I don't know where must I put my config file?...if it's the same as emacs must be in "C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Datos de programa"

but seems it doesn't work...
please help

can I edit my cnfig file inside conkeror as I do with emacs?

djcb said...

@Anonymous: you mean your emacs configuration file? The easiest way is to start emacs, and literally edit ~/.emacs -- wherever that is on your disk is the place is where emacs searches; ie.

C-x C-f ~/.emacs RET

(This may also be useful: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/)

You cannot edit files in conkeror, but you can set emacs as the editor for e.g. text fields.

Anonymous said...

http://jasonm23.github.com/emacs-theme-editor/ is worth a look

pX said...

Senny, when a whole repository is named something.el, I cant't seem to install it properly w/o emacs, at load-time, thinking the dir is actually a file.

Now I renamed all my elisp projects.

Just my two cents.

pX said...

Senny, when a repo is named something.el, emacs has a hard-time opening it to put its content in load-path.

Try it : cd to somewhere inside your load-path, then git clone your repo, then quit & launch emacs. CQFD.

NB - I use (normal-top-level-add-subdirs-to-load-path) but I'm pretty sure that's not the real reason. (IMHO the real reason is a bug : emacs should now if something.el is a dir or afile, period)