switch-theme

Tool for switching themes in

• vim
• tmux
• zsh
• bat
• VS Code
• Azure Data Studio
• Terminal Emulators
  • gnome
  • mintty
  • Terminal.app

Installation

switch-theme uses secondary files and a shell function, so you'll need to ensure the executable (bin/switch-theme) is in your $PATH. If you're using homebrew, you can run brew install flare576/scripts/switch-theme.

You'll also need to add

source "$(switch-theme)"

to your .zshrc or .zshenv to make the st function available, then from your command line you can run st [dark|night] or st [light|day] to switch all your tools to the provided theme.

If you want to configure your terminal emulator, run switch-theme -s for initial setup.

Themes

Each sub-folder in this folder represents a theme. A theme consists of:

• Terminal Themes
  • .terminal for Terminal.app (OSX)
  • .minttyrc for mintty/wsltty (WSL)
  • .gnome for gnome (Chromebook)
• Main applications
  • *_tmux
  • *_vim
  • *_zsh
• config file

A theme's folder name must be the same as the name attribute in the config.

Colors

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to grok colors in ZSH/terminals/tmux, so I'll try to lay out what I've learned here.

Start at the Top - Terminals

Your terminal emulator controls 2 things

• How many "Slots" of colors you can use
• The values those slots represent

For example, Apple's Terminal.app offers 16 colors in its themes. Some terminal emulators offer 8, some offer 256 or more. See ANSI Escape Codes for info on the number of "slots" and their default values. For this doc, I'll be talking about Terminal.app.

When you load a theme, you're filling the slots you have available with different values, but you're not changing their names.

And their names are where I got lost. At the very core, though, the names are escape sequences:

\e[31m

That is literally how you refer to a color whose default value is "red". Go ahead, type the following into your terminal; it should show up red.

echo "\e[31mHello World"

The first chart on the page I linked to above (for 3- and 4-bit colors) shows that 30-37 are the number-parts for standard Foreground names, and 40-47 are for Background. 90-97 and 100-107 are for "Bold" or "Bright" or "Extended" colors; don't get too worried about the term, just think of them as a few more names you have to work with.

What the Shell

Then you step into your shell. I'll be talking about ZSH because that's what I've researched, but other shells may do a similar re-assigning to this.

ZSH makes using colors easier† by replacing the escape codes with functions and alternate keys: ZSH Theme Cheat Sheet. It provides 8 standardized names (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white) as well as number codes for the spectrum of 256 colors.

†Once you understand how your terminal theme, escape codes, and ZSH's mappings work, it actually does make things easier... until then, it was just another layer of confusion for me.

My advice is to avoid both the $fg[colorname] and %F{...} mechanisms. While experimenting I found that the 8 color names were essentially worthless (since you can't access the "Bold" colors) and that the shorthand %F failed to load any colors beyond 007. Just use the upper-case $FG[###] function.

$FG[###] Explained

If you run spectrum_ls, you'll get back an example of all the colors you have available, but pay special attention to 000-015; these are your themes definitions of 30-37 and 90-97. If you dive into source code for spectrum_ls you'll see why...

It's our friend, escape codes! Going back to that Wiki page, we can see that \e[38;5;___m is the escape code for "Select foreground color" and \e[48;5;___m is the code for background! And that syntax is just making an "associative array" where ${FG[001]} holds the value \e[38;5;001m, which is just the 8-bit way of writing \e[31m; from before!

FG + %{ + %} = PROMPTS

So, now we know that, in ZSH, we can use the FG variable (Array Syntax) and 000 through 255 to reference colors. Additionally, when we're building command prompt, we use the %{...%} syntax to indicate a string is an escape sequence. Putting those together, we can make our shell prompt a red greater-than sign:

PROMPT='%{${FG[001]}%}> '

Except... now all of our input is red! ZSH also provides helper functions (%f for foreground, %k for background) to turn off all the formatting we've added, so we can round out our code with that:

PROMPT='%{${FG[001]}%}>%f '

TMUX

tmux, like ZSH, is beholden to the terminal emulator in which it's running to define the colors it can use. Unlike ZSH, however, it provides sane, human-readable values††. Running any of the following from the tmux command line will cause the window listing to display red text on a green background (ew)

:set-window-option -g window-status-current-style fg=colour9,bg=colour2
:set-window-option -g window-status-current-style fg=brightred,bg=green
:set-window-option -g window-status-current-style fg='#CC4D16',bg='#859900'

††Human readable, but also British English... still an improvement!

VIM

I actually never even had to open the vim plugin; "It Just Works"! Based on a quick look, though, I'd say that vim plugins get to use hex codes for their colors.

Attribution

• Solarized Dark Terminal.app Theme from Matijs
• Solarized Light Terminal.app Theme adapted from above using Solarized Main Page
• Solarized Light/Dark Tmux Theme from Seebi
• Solarized Light/Dark ZSH Theme is based on work by Wesbos
• Solarized Light/Dark vim Theme from Ethan Schoonover