Analog

01100100010102

 Hi! You've found the place where I leave tutorial-style notes for various projects and rant about broken computers and how they fail. 

Zenburn Theme for the terminal

Jan 23, 2019

So today I glanced down to my i3 status bar, and thought man those colours are fugly. By default, these are white, fully saturated neon green and red on black:

‘5 minutes is enough to configure the colors for this, right?’

Some research and 2 hours down the rabbit-hole later, and everything from my text editor to the status bar is Zenburn-themed.

Zenburn is a low-contrast theme meant to ensure your eyes do not fall off when you’re having that mexican-standoff with whatever project you happen to be Vimming.

But most of us spend a lot of time in text editors and on the command line, and Zenburn is a theme for Vim only. This useful and beautiful theme does not have an .Xresources file listed on the official page of Zenburn things.

As I’m a fan of cohesion, this now exists, this blog post will explain how.

First, I extracted the colors from the original zenburn.vim using simple regex:

matches = re.findall(r'#(?:[0-9a-fA-F]{3}){1,2}', line)

I then used yattag, a Python library for creating HTML, and displayed all the unique colors from the file. It looks like this:

#c0bed1

#bc6c4c

#80d4aa

#dfdfbf

#4f4f4f

#2b2b2b

#bc8cbc

#d0d0a0

#e89393

#82a282

#304a3d

#444444

#8f8f8f

#2e3330

#242424

#f8f893

#41363c

#88b090

#f0f0c0

#dccdcc

#121212

#313c36

#efef8f

#bc6c9c

#2f2f2f

#464646

#353535

#ecbcbc

#71d3b4

#dcdccc

#7cac7c

#222222

#93b3a3

#5b605e

#dfdfdf

#000d18

#0f0f0f

#353a37

#ffd7a7

#dc8c6c

#dca3a3

#383838

#1f1f1f

#b2b2a0

#b6bf98

#e3ceab

#688060

#709080

#cc9393

#434343

#dfaf8f

#3a3a39

#acd0b3

#2c2e2e

#bca3a3

#efefaf

#545a4f

#343434

#2c302d

#000000

#a0afa0

#313633

#6c6c9c

#8c8cbc

#9fafaf

#efefef

#d0d0b8

#9ccc9c

#8faf9f

#3f3f3f

#ffffe0

#ffffff

#284f28

#664040

#ccd990

#c3bf9f

#dfcfaf

#e37170

#1c1c1b

#efdcbc

#ccccbc

#233323

#333333

#f18c96

#404040

#161616

#262626

#f0f0b0

#cfcfaf

#f0dfaf

#385f38

#040404

#9ece9e

#cbecd0

#434443

#dfe4cf

#3f4040

#ccdc90

#3d3535

#101010

#f0efd0

#ffcfaf

#7f9f7f

#2e2e2e

#181818

#9f9f9f

#8cd0d3

#cfbfaf

To get the colors to make a bit of sense, some sorting was in order. I spent some time reading this excellent article about why sorting colours is a pain. I then did some quick RGB to HSV conversion and sorting, and voilà: