I released my first (and only) Emacs theme in February this year, including publishing to Melpa. Since then I’ve released some automatically generated monochrome variants, and I’ve been iterating on a dark variant today (now in beta).

I started working on Poet because I spend a significant amount of time working in Emacs: programming in C, Python, PHP, Rust (I end up going to IntelliJ for Java & Android); maintaining notes, lists, plans, tasks, time-tracking, etc. And – just about as much time as the rest – tweaking Emacs to make it perfect.

Part of that meant I wanted to have a much better experience writing prose . And of course, I particularly wanted to be able to use Org and Evil with a great UI.

Certain Markdown editors – particularly Typora – had a much better writing experience; I also particularly enjoyed reading Edward Tufte’s books and was very fond of the typography and design behind Tufte CSS. White on yellow for accents was a design choice that had been running through my head ever since I saw some art using black on yellow with white accents.

Mixing in some inspiration from legendary color schemes like Leuven – which is a great example of just how well a theme can support org-mode, and Jazz – which does a great job with mode-lines helped me make Poet.

Finally, I realized that it’s possible to mix and match different types of fonts in Emacs, which is what adds the most value to the theme. I basically manually identified faces that should be fixed-pitch and those that can be variable-pitch and went ahead and explicitly listed them as such in the theme.

Later on, I found out about Mixed Pitch Mode which would have probably been better to base my work off of; that said I really wanted to be able to completely own the behaviour (for example, poet also slightly increases the line-height).