1 Solarized Color Theme for irssi
2 ===============================
4 Initially created by Huy Z \<huy-git-pub circled-a huyzing.com\>, this is a
5 repository of themes for the [irssi] IRC chat client that support the
6 [Solarized] color scheme.
8 [irssi]: http://www.irssi.org/
9 [Solarized]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
11 Visit the Solarized homepage
12 ----------------------------
14 See the [Solarized] homepage for screenshots, details and color theme
15 implementations for terminal emulators and other applications, such as Vim,
18 Understanding Solarized Colors in Terminals
19 -------------------------------------------
21 ### Solarized Colors vs. ANSI Colors ###
23 8-color terminal programs such as irssi use color codes that correspond to the
24 expected 8 normal ANSI colors. irssi additionally supports bold, which
25 terminal emulators will usually display by using the *bright* versions of the 8
26 ANSI colors and/or by using a bold typeface with a heavier weight. (Note that
27 different terminal emulators may have slightly different ideas of what color
28 values to use when displaying the 16 [ANSI color escape
29 codes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors).)
31 In order to be displayed by 8-color terminal programs, which cannot specify RGB
32 values, Solarized must replace the default ANSI colors. Since the Solarized
33 palette uses 16 colors, not only must this color scheme replace the 8 normal
34 colors but must also take over the 8 *bright* colors, for a total of 16 colors.
35 This means that a Solarized terminal application loses the ability to bold text
36 but gains 8 more Solarized colors.
38 About half of the Solarized palette is reminiscent of the original ANSI
39 colors, e.g. Solarized red is close to ANSI red (or more precisely, the
40 general consensus of what ANSI red should look like). But the rest of the
41 Solarized colors do not correspond to any ANSI colors, e.g. there is no ANSI
42 color that corresponds to Solarized orange or purple.
44 This means that, for example, if the irssi theme wants to display "green", a
45 Solarized terminal will display something close to green, but if the theme
46 wants to display "bold yellow" or "bright yellow", a Solarized terminal will
47 not be able to display it. However, a Solarized theme will be able to display
48 the new colors orange and purple and also several shades of gray. This is
49 again thanks to the replacement of the ANSI *bright* colors; e.g. ANSI "bold
50 red", which is usually displayed as "bright red", will now show as Solarized
51 orange, while ANSI "bold blue", which is usually displayed as "bright blue",
52 will now be a shade of gray.
54 ### Terminal Emulator ###
56 Because irssi is an ANSI 8-color terminal program, it is entirely dependent on
57 the terminal emulator for the display of its colors. You cannot directly tell
58 an irssi theme to display Solarized orange, e.g. by specifying an RGB value.
59 Instead, the theme's colors must be chosen using the ANSI color codes with the
60 expectation that the terminal emulator will display them as appropriate
61 Solarized colors. For example, the irssi color format `%R` which normally
62 would be "bold red" is expected to be displayed by the terminal emulator as
65 So in order for irssi to display the Solarized palette, you have to set your
66 Terminal emulator's color settings to the Solarized palette. The [Solarized
67 repository] includes theme settings for some popular terminal emulators as
68 well as Xdefaults; or you can download them from the official [Solarized]
69 homepage. If you use the irssi themes *without* having changed your
70 emulator's palette, you will get a strange selection of colors that may be
73 Yes, this means that, to use the Solarized theme for irssi, you need to change
74 color settings for not one but two different programs: your terminal emulator
75 and irssi. The two sets of settings will work in concert to display Solarized
80 Historically, there has been a one-to-one correspondence between the bolded
81 versions of the 8 default ANSI colors and the bright versions of the 8 default
82 colors. Back in the day, when a color program demanded the display of bold
83 text, it was probably just easier for terminal emulators to display a brighter
84 version of whatever color the text was (and expect the user to interpret that
85 as bold) than to display a typeface with a bold weight
87 Nowadays, it is easy for terminal emulators to display bold typefaces, so it
88 doesn't make sense for bolded text to change color, but the confusing
89 association remains. In fact, new terminal emulators allow users to break the
90 correspondence between bold and bright and can simply change the font.
92 However, ANSI 8-color terminal applications such as irssi only have a
93 conception of bold and don't know about the possibility of using up to 16
94 colors. So to use all 16 Solarized colors, we change the semantics of "bold"
95 in the theme to mean that we want to access the 8 new Solarized colors,
96 including the grays. Recall the example above, where we described that the
97 irssi color format `%R`, which would have normally displayed bold red, is
98 expected to show up as Solarized orange.
100 This is why it is important to *not* break the association between bold and
101 bright colors. Many terminal emulators offer an option to disable the use of
102 bright colors for bold, and you must not do so. Often, new users of Solarized
103 will be confused when they change their terminal emulator's color palette to
104 Solarized but haven't yet installed Solarized-specific color themes for all
105 their terminal applications (e.g. mutt, ls's dircolors, irssi, and their
106 colorized shell prompts). They will see texts that are hard to read or
107 disappear entirely. The solution isn't to disable bright colors; the solution
108 is to install Solarized color themes for all terminal applications and then you
109 will have all 16 colors.
111 Also, because the semantics of "bold" are lost in favor of more colors, it
112 also makes sense to disable the display of bold text as a bold typeface. It
113 won't hurt to see bold typefaces wherever the new 8 Solarized colors are
114 displayed but it doesn't make much sense anymore.
119 The first irssi theme, called "universal", was designed to work best with both
120 Solarized Dark and Light palettes, but also to work under default terminal
121 colors. In other words, this theme was designed with a "fallback" scenario: if
122 you happen to find yourself on a terminal where the Solarized palette has not
123 been set up, you won't have elements become invisible or incrediby hard to
126 Thus, this theme has been designed with these 4 palettes in mind:
128 - Solarized Dark: "universal" works best with this scheme
129 - Solarized Light: "universal" works with this scheme almost as well as with
130 Solarized Dark (you probably won't notice the difference, but if you do, it
131 could be optimized slightly by switching the theme's use of some of the
132 Solarized base colors)
133 - Default dark-background terminal colors
134 - Default light-background terminal colors
136 This theme was designed to be clean and functional, starting from the default
137 theme distributed with irssi. Colors are strictly used for functionality and
138 the number of colors visible is minimized when possible. Colors were selected
139 based on the characteristics of the text characters to be displayed:
141 - Visibility generally follows importance, with an attempt to let unimportant
142 text fade into the background (which is not always possible when
143 simultaneously supporting dark and light backgrounds)
144 - Loud colors are chosen to call attention to noteworthy messages
146 ### Supported Scripts ###
148 The following third-party scripts are supported:
150 - [adv\_windowlist.pl](http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/Code/Irssi/)
151 - [usercount.pl](http://scripts.irssi.org/html/usercount.pl.html)
152 - [trackbar.pl](http://scripts.irssi.org/html/trackbar.pl.html)
156 This is how the "universal" theme for irssi looks under different palettes.
157 Click images to see screenshots.
159 Solarized Dark (this example uses iTerm2 on OS X):
161 [<img src="https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_dark-th.png">](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_dark.png)
163 Solarized Light (this example uses iTerm2 on OS X):
165 [<img src="https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_light-th.png">](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_light.png)
167 Default dark terminal colors (this example uses Apple's Terminal.app on OS X):
169 [<img src="https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-Terminal.app-dark-th.png">](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-Terminal.app-dark.png)
171 Default light terminal colors (this example uses iTerm on OS X):
173 [<img src="https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm-light-th.png">](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm-light.png)
178 If you have come across these themes via the [irssi-only repository] on github,
179 you may want to check the main [Solarized repository] to see if there is an
182 At some point, the [irssi-only repository] may be kept in sync with the main
183 [Solarized repository] and would then only be preserved separately for
184 installation convenience only. At this time, issues, bug reports, changelogs
185 are to be reported at the [irssi-only repository].
187 [Solarized repository]: https://github.com/altercation/solarized
188 [irssi-only repository]: https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized
194 1. Make sure that you have changed your terminal emulator's color settings to
195 the Solarized palette. (See the section "Understanding Solarized Colors in
196 Terminals" for an explanation.)
198 1. Make sure that bold text is displayed using bright colors. For example,
199 - For iTerm2 on OS X, this means that Text Preferences must have the `Draw
200 bold text in bright colors` checkbox *selected*.
201 - For Apple's Terminal.app on OS X, this means that Text Settings must
202 have the `Use bright colors for bold text` checkbox *selected*.
204 2. It's recommended to turn off the display of bold typeface for bold
206 - For iTerm2 on OS X, this means that Text Preferences should have the
207 `Draw bold text in bold font` checkbox *unselected*.
208 - For Apple's Terminal.app on OS X, this means that Text Settings
209 should have the `Use bold fonts` checkbox *unselected*.
210 - For XTerm, this may mean setting the `font` and `boldFont` to be the
211 same in your .Xresources or .Xdefaults, e.g.:
214 xterm*boldFont: fixed
216 Example: for iTerm2, these are the correct settings:
218 
220 2. Obtain `solarized-universal.theme`
222 a) Option A: Download `solarized-universal.theme` from [irssi-only repository]
223 and place it in your `~/.irssi` directory
225 b) Option B: To always have the latest version, clone the git repository:
227 $ git clone git://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized.git
228 $ ln -s $PWD/irssi-colors-solarized/solarized-universal.theme ~/.irssi/.
230 3. Change your `~/.irssi/config` to include the following settings, while making
231 sure to replace `YOUR_NICKNAME` with your IRC nickname:
238 theme = "solarized-universal";
239 hilight_color = "= %R";
244 { text = "YOUR_NICKNAME"; color = "%M"; nick = "yes"; word = "yes"; }
251 lag = "{sb Lag: %m$0-%n}";
252 act = "{sb Act: $0-}";
253 more = "%k%3-- more --%n";
258 4. Optionally, if you have the `adv_windowlist.pl` or `trackbar.pl` scripts
259 installed, modify your `~/.irssi/config` so that:
263 "perl/core/scripts" = {
265 ### For Solarized adv_windowlist.pl script
266 awl_display_key_active = "%k%2[$Q=$N:$C]%n";
267 awl_display_nokey_active = "%k%2[$N:$C]%n";
268 awl_display_key = "[$Q:$H$C$S]";
269 awl_display_nokey = "[$N:$H$C$S]";
271 ### For Solarized trackbar.pl script
272 trackbar_style = "%B";
279 The Solarized Color Values
280 --------------------------
282 L\*a\*b values are canonical (White D65, Reference D50), other values are
283 matched in sRGB space.
285 SOLARIZED HEX 16/8 TERMCOL XTERM/HEX L*A*B sRGB HSB
286 --------- ------- ---- ------- ----------- ---------- ----------- -----------
287 base03 #002b36 8/4 brblack 234 #1c1c1c 15 -12 -12 0 43 54 193 100 21
288 base02 #073642 0/4 black 235 #262626 20 -12 -12 7 54 66 192 90 26
289 base01 #586e75 10/7 brgreen 240 #4e4e4e 45 -07 -07 88 110 117 194 25 46
290 base00 #657b83 11/7 bryellow 241 #585858 50 -07 -07 101 123 131 195 23 51
291 base0 #839496 12/6 brblue 244 #808080 60 -06 -03 131 148 150 186 13 59
292 base1 #93a1a1 14/4 brcyan 245 #8a8a8a 65 -05 -02 147 161 161 180 9 63
293 base2 #eee8d5 7/7 white 254 #d7d7af 92 -00 10 238 232 213 44 11 93
294 base3 #fdf6e3 15/7 brwhite 230 #ffffd7 97 00 10 253 246 227 44 10 99
295 yellow #b58900 3/3 yellow 136 #af8700 60 10 65 181 137 0 45 100 71
296 orange #cb4b16 9/3 brred 166 #d75f00 50 50 55 203 75 22 18 89 80
297 red #dc322f 1/1 red 160 #d70000 50 65 45 220 50 47 1 79 86
298 magenta #d33682 5/5 magenta 125 #af005f 50 65 -05 211 54 130 331 74 83
299 violet #6c71c4 13/5 brmagenta 61 #5f5faf 50 15 -45 108 113 196 237 45 77
300 blue #268bd2 4/4 blue 33 #0087ff 55 -10 -45 38 139 210 205 82 82
301 cyan #2aa198 6/6 cyan 37 #00afaf 60 -35 -05 42 161 152 175 74 63
302 green #859900 2/2 green 64 #5f8700 60 -20 65 133 153 0 68 100 60
v.licheni.net / stack / conf / irssi-colors-solarized.git / blob