Solarized Color Theme for irssi =============================== Initially created by Huy Z \, this is a repository of themes for the [irssi] IRC chat client that support the [Solarized] color scheme. [irssi]: http://www.irssi.org/ [Solarized]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized Visit the Solarized homepage ---------------------------- See the [Solarized] homepage for screenshots, details and color theme implementations for terminal emulators and other applications, such as Vim, Emacs, and Mutt. Understanding Solarized Colors in Terminals ------------------------------------------- ### Solarized Colors vs. ANSI Colors ### 8-color terminal programs such as irssi use color codes that correspond to the expected 8 normal ANSI colors. irssi additionally supports bold, which terminal emulators will usually display by using the *bright* versions of the 8 ANSI colors and/or by using a bold typeface with a heavier weight. (Note that different terminal emulators may have slightly different ideas of what color values to use when displaying the 16 [ANSI color escape codes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors).) In order to be displayed by 8-color terminal programs, which cannot specify RGB values, Solarized must replace the default ANSI colors. Since the Solarized palette uses 16 colors, not only must this color scheme replace the 8 normal colors but must also take over the 8 *bright* colors, for a total of 16 colors. This means that a Solarized terminal application loses the ability to bold text but gains 8 more Solarized colors. About half of the Solarized palette is reminiscent of the original ANSI colors, e.g. Solarized red is close to ANSI red (or more precisley, the general consensus of what ANSI red should look like). But the rest of the Solarized colors do not correspond to any ANSI colors, e.g. there is no ANSI color that corresponds to Solarized orange or purple. This means that, for example, if the irssi theme wants to display "green", a Solarized terminal will display something close to green, but if the theme wants to display "bold yellow" or "bright yellow", a Solarized terminal will not be able to display it. However, a Solarized theme will be able to display the new colors orange and purple and also several shades of gray. This is again thanks to the replacement of the ANSI *bright* colors; e.g. ANSI "bold red", which is usually displayed as "bright red", will now show as Solarized orange, while ANSI "bold blue", which is usually displayed as "bright blue", will now be a shade of gray. ### Terminal Emulator ### Because irssi is an ANSI 8-color terminal program, it is entirely dependent on the terminal emulator for the display of its colors. You cannot directly tell an irssi theme to display Solarized orange, e.g. by specifying an RGB value. Instead, the theme's colors must be chosen using the ANSI color codes with the expectation that the terminal emulator will display them as appropriate Solarized colors. For example, the irssi color format `%R` which normally would be "bold red" is expected to be displayed by the terminal emulator as Solarized orange. So in order for irssi to display the Solarized palette, you have to set your Terminal emulator's color settings to the Solarized palette. The [Solarized repository] includes theme settings for some popular terminal emulators as well as Xdefaults; or you can download them from the official [Solarized] homepage. If you use the irssi themes *without* having changed your emulator's palette, you will get a strange selection of colors that may be hard to read. Yes, this means that, to use the Solarized theme for irssi, you need to change color settings for not one but two different programs: your terminal emulator and irssi. The two sets of settings will work in concert to display Solarized colors appropriately. ### Bold Settings ### Historically, there has been a one-to-one correspondence between the bolded versions of the 8 default ANSI colors and the bright versions of the 8 default colors. Back in the day, when a color program demanded the display of bold text, it was probably just easier for terminal emulators to display a brighter version of whatever color the text was (and expect the user to interpret that as bold) than to display a typeface with a bold weight Nowadays, it is easy for terminal emulators to display bold typefaces, so it doesn't make sense for bolded text to change color, but the confusing association remains. In fact, new terminal emulators allow users to break the correspondence between bold and bright and can simply change the font. However, ANSI 8-color terminal applications such as irssi only have a conception of bold and don't know about the possibility of using up to 16 colors. So to use all 16 Solarized colors, we change the semantics of "bold" in the theme to mean that we want to access the 8 new Solarized colors, including the grays. Recall the example above, where we described that the irssi color format `%R`, which would have normally displayed bold red, is expected to show up as Solarized orange. This is why it is important to *not* break the association between bold and bright colors. Many terminal emulators offer an option to disable the use of bright colors for bold, and you must not do so. Often, new users of Solarized will be confused when they change their terminal emulator's color palette to Solarized but haven't yet installed Solarized-specific color themes for all their terminal applications (e.g. mutt, ls's dircolors, irssi, and their colorized shell prompts). They will see texts that are hard to read or disappear entirely. The solution isn't to disable bright colors; the solution is to install Solarized color themes for all terminal applications and then you will have all 16 colors. Also, because the semantics of "bold" are lost in favor of more colors, it also makes sense to disable the display of bold text as a bold typeface. It won't hurt to see bold typefaces wherever the new 8 Solarized colors are displayed but it doesn't make much sense anymore. Universal theme --------------- The first irssi theme, called "universal", was designed to work best with both Solarized Dark and Light palettes, but also to work under default terminal colors. In other words, this theme was designed with a "fallback" scenario: if you happen to find yourself on a terminal where the Solarized palette has not been set up, you won't have elements become invisible or incrediby hard to read. Thus, this theme has been designed with these 4 palettes in mind: - Solarized Dark: "universal" works best with this scheme - Solarized Light: "universal" works almost as well as Solarized Dark (you probably won't notice the difference, but if you do, it could be optimized slightly by switching the theme's use of some of the Solarized base colors) - Default dark-background terminal colors - Default light-background terminal colors This theme was designed to be clean and functional, starting from the default theme distributed with irssi. Colors are strictly used for functionality and the number of colors visible is minimized when possible. Colors were selected based on the characteristics of the text characters to be displayed: - Visibility generally follows importance, with an attempt to let unimportant text fade into the background (which is not always possible when simultaneously supporting dark and light backgrounds) - Loud colors are chosen to call attention to noteworthy messages ### Supported Scripts ### The following third-party scripts are supported: - [adv\_windowlist.pl](http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/Code/Irssi/) - [usercount.pl](http://scripts.irssi.org/html/usercount.pl.html) - [trackbar.pl](http://scripts.irssi.org/html/trackbar.pl.html) ### Screenshots ### This is how the "universal" theme for irssi looks under different palettes. Click images to see screenshots. Solarized Dark (this example uses iTerm2 on OS X): [](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_dark.png) Solarized Light (this example uses iTerm2 on OS X): [](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm2-solarized_light.png) Default dark terminal colors (this example uses Apple's Terminal.app on OS X): [](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-Terminal.app-dark.png) Default light terminal colors (this example uses iTerm on OS X): [](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-irssi-in-iTerm-light.png) Downloads --------- If you have come across these themes via the [irssi-only repository] on github, you may want to check the main [Solarized repository] to see if there is an official theme. At some point, the [irssi-only repository] may be kept in sync with the main [Solarized repository] and would then only be preserved separately for installation convenience only. At this time, issues, bug reports, changelogs are to be reported at the [irssi-only repository]. [Solarized repository]: https://github.com/altercation/solarized [irssi-only repository]: https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized Installation ------------ 1. Make sure that you have changed your terminal emulator's color settings to the Solarized palette. (See the section "Understanding Solarized Colors in Terminals" for an explanation.) 1. Make sure that bold text is displayed using bright colors. For example, - For iTerm2 on OS X, this means that Text Preferences must have the `Draw bold text in bright colors` checkbox *selected*. - For Apple's Terminal.app on OS X, this means that Text Settings must have the `Use bright colors for bold text` checkbox *selected*. 2. It's recommended to turn off the display of bold typeface for bold text. For example, - For iTerm2 on OS X, this means that Text Preferences should have the `Draw bold text in bold font` checkbox *unselected*. - For Apple's Terminal.app on OS X, this means that Text Settings should have the `Use bold fonts` checkbox *unselected*. Example: for iTerm2, these are the correct settings: ![iTerm bold settings](https://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized/raw/master/img/screen-iTerm2-bold-options.png) 2. Obtain `solarized-universal.theme` a) Option A: Download `solarized-universal.theme` from [irssi-only repository] and place it in your `~/.irssi` directory b) Option B: To always have the latest version, clone the git repository: $ git clone git://github.com/huyz/irssi-colors-solarized.git $ ln -s $PWD/irssi-colors-solarized/solarized-universal.theme ~/.irssi/. 3. Change your `~/.irssi/config` to include the following settings, while making sure to replace `YOUR_NICKNAME` with your IRC nickname: settings = { ... "fe-common/core" = { ... # Solarized theme = "solarized-universal"; hilight_color = "= %R"; }; ... }; hilights = ( { text = "YOUR_NICKNAME"; color = "%M"; nick = "yes"; word = "yes"; } ); statusbar = { ... items = { ... # Solarized lag = "{sb Lag: %m$0-%n}"; act = "{sb Act: $0-}"; more = "%k%3-- more --%n"; }; ... }; 4. Optionally, if you have the `adv_windowlist.pl` or `trackbar.pl` scripts installed, modify your `~/.irssi/config` so that: settings = { ... "perl/core/scripts" = { ... ### For Solarized adv_windowlist.pl script awl_display_key_active = "%k%2[$Q=$N:$C]%n"; awl_display_nokey_active = "%k%2[$N:$C]%n"; awl_display_key = "[$Q:$H$C$S]"; awl_display_nokey = "[$N:$H$C$S]"; ### For Solarized trackbar.pl script trackbar_style = "%B"; }; ... }; The Solarized Color Values -------------------------- L\*a\*b values are canonical (White D65, Reference D50), other values are matched in sRGB space. SOLARIZED HEX 16/8 TERMCOL XTERM/HEX L*A*B sRGB HSB --------- ------- ---- ------- ----------- ---------- ----------- ----------- base03 #002b36 8/4 brblack 234 #1c1c1c 15 -12 -12 0 43 54 193 100 21 base02 #073642 0/4 black 235 #262626 20 -12 -12 7 54 66 192 90 26 base01 #586e75 10/7 brgreen 240 #4e4e4e 45 -07 -07 88 110 117 194 25 46 base00 #657b83 11/7 bryellow 241 #585858 50 -07 -07 101 123 131 195 23 51 base0 #839496 12/6 brblue 244 #808080 60 -06 -03 131 148 150 186 13 59 base1 #93a1a1 14/4 brcyan 245 #8a8a8a 65 -05 -02 147 161 161 180 9 63 base2 #eee8d5 7/7 white 254 #d7d7af 92 -00 10 238 232 213 44 11 93 base3 #fdf6e3 15/7 brwhite 230 #ffffd7 97 00 10 253 246 227 44 10 99 yellow #b58900 3/3 yellow 136 #af8700 60 10 65 181 137 0 45 100 71 orange #cb4b16 9/3 brred 166 #d75f00 50 50 55 203 75 22 18 89 80 red #dc322f 1/1 red 160 #d70000 50 65 45 220 50 47 1 79 86 magenta #d33682 5/5 magenta 125 #af005f 50 65 -05 211 54 130 331 74 83 violet #6c71c4 13/5 brmagenta 61 #5f5faf 50 15 -45 108 113 196 237 45 77 blue #268bd2 4/4 blue 33 #0087ff 55 -10 -45 38 139 210 205 82 82 cyan #2aa198 6/6 cyan 37 #00afaf 60 -35 -05 42 161 152 175 74 63 green #859900 2/2 green 64 #5f8700 60 -20 65 133 153 0 68 100 60 License ------- Copyright (c) 2011 Huy Z Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.