I’ve previously tweaked Solarized to my tastes. I feel that was a pretty clearcut improvement. This attempt is a lot braver:

• Light and dark versions that both work.
• Slightly higher contrast, both between the colours and with the background.
• Warmer shades of gray, yay!
• More custom colours (hijacks the colour cube 😱).

Light

Shades of gray, colours, optional backgrounds, and even more optional hi-vis backgrounds:

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Interested in exploring the colours in OKLCH?

The following are snippets you can paste to Huetone. Dark-to-light and light-to-dark backgrounds:

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The various colours:

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Why?

I like the feel of the original Solarized colour theme. I just wanted more and better:

• Slightly better separation of colours. The original had red and orange right next to each other.
• Slightly higher contrast. It’s impossible to have good contrast when the colours are the same on both the dark and light backgrounds.
• Coloured backgrounds. For like git history & stuff?

Why not selenized?

Selenized has had a lot of work put into it. However: I don’t like the green (too cold), and I did miss the orange and the purple. Yes it’s good to preserve the semantics of terminal colours. Had I not already worked around Solarized hijacking the “bright” colours, I would’ve preferred this.

What?

• The “authoritative” colours are in the OKLCH colourspace, view source here or see GitHub. The hex colours are displayed for your convenience.
• Kitty themes: light and dark. They hijack parts of the colour cube (colours 16-231) to provide coloured backgrounds.
• A relatively short Vim/Neovim theme supporting Tree-sitter, Vimwiki, and some other stuff I use. Requires a true color terminal with set termguicolors.

The original Solarized (left) and my previous improvements (right):

And these new ones, light (left) and dark (right):