purp, an Emacs theme of few colors

12 Dec 2018

A few years ago, I asked on Reddit whether anyone had recommendations for a theme that used only a few colors. I found that too many colors—what many refer to as a Christmas tree—was not helping me understand code better, but in fact was distracting me. I also thought that turning off syntax highlighting entirely was too radical a solution. I wanted a theme that would just highlight a few, well-chosen elements. Unfortunately, most of the minimal themes that I found were monochrome, which is not what I was looking for.

So I began working on a theme of few colors that I’ve been using and tweaking for a while now. I’ve finally decided to make it available on Github and publish it to MELPA. You can install purp by invoking the command M-x package-install RET purp-theme . A light version called purp-light is also included in the package.

I have not gone and modified the color of every face in every mode, just the ones that I encountered daily in my work. In programming modes, you’ll see the following colors:

Purple for function definitions

Green for comments

Orange for string literals

Yellow on red for dangerous stuff (e.g., the unsafe keyword in Rust)

keyword in Rust) White (or black) for everything else

The colors for function definitions and comments makes them easy to find and the color for strings helps to spot an un-escaped double quote.

I hope you like purp, there’s a lot of work left to be done, including how to not have it activate as soon as it’s installed, which is a really bad first impression.