Please review my web-based Emacs color theme generator

Please review my web-based Emacs color theme generator(alexpogosyan.com)

126 points by pogos 16 years ago | 50 comments

yanowitz 16 years ago |

This is so crazy cool I can't believe it. Thanks for making it so much easier to quickly play with my config.

Nice to haves: 1. select your language sample (ruby, lisp, c++, etc.) 2. paste in an existing config and have it load that to start with

But regardless, great tool. Many thanks!

pogos 16 years ago | |

#1 is already on my todo list

#2 is a great idea! I think I'll try to implement it, thank you.

gn 16 years ago | | |

I second yanowitz: this is wicked cool, thank you very much; it would be even more awesome than it already is if we had a choice of language. Do you think you could find the time to include Javascript and sh?

adg 16 years ago |

I kept clicking on parts of the code hoping it'd automatically select the type of element I had clicked on so I could change its color. Looks like I'm the only one, though, judging from the other comments.

pogos 16 years ago | |

this is somewhere at the end of my todo list, thanks for reminding me :-)

pogos 16 years ago |

This is a very basic editor. I'm planning to add more options (fonts, decorations etc) and more languages.

protomyth 16 years ago | |

kudos to you, it is quite nice

mapleoin 16 years ago | |

why not make the code public so we can help?

jrockway 16 years ago |

For those of you who don't want to leave Emacs to customize Emacs, you can just put the point near the face that you want to customize, type M-x customize-face, accept the default, and follow the instructions from there. This works in all Emacsen newer than about 18 or so.

iheartmemcache 16 years ago | |

Even simpler, just open a scratch buffer, paste the code, and evaluate the expressions with C-x C-e.

jrockway 16 years ago | | |

I am talking about how to, given some code in an arbitrary language and you wanting to change the color of some construct, do that with built-in emacs mechanisms. I think going to a web page, pasting your code, tweaking, and then putting some random lisp back into emacs is a waste of effort when Emacs already has this functionality built in.

ptomato 16 years ago |

You probably should have something to display hex codes/color name or something like that so that you can ensure that two colors for different elements are the same.

mprime 16 years ago |

Maybe there's a way to do it that I missed, but it would be helpful if when I select a color from the palette, I could see the Hex/RGB value for the color and set it from that as well. That way when I want to set two elements to the same color, I wouldn't have to wait and change it in the config file (which defeats the whole purpose of this application).

Otherwise, great idea!

ambulatorybird 16 years ago |

I'd also suggest letting the user select from a list of pre-defined colors.

nfriedly 16 years ago |

That's awesome!

Does anybody know of one of these for the bash shell prompt?

ionrock 16 years ago |

I've always had mixed opinions of color-theme and this really makes it easy to get right. Thanks!

VMG 16 years ago |

I had this idea a while ago, very pleased to see it realized. What terminals are supported?

I wanted to do it for all the permutations of vim, zsh, LS_COLORS, gnome-terminal, urxvt xterm and so forth

It would be nice to be able to click the keyword and select the color then.

cvd 16 years ago |

This is great. By the way, do you (or anyone else) know of a good tutorial/guide for creating color combinations that go well together?

UPDATE: One thing that would be nice is to be able to drop a pre-existing color theme in and then tweak it with the color picker.

msg 16 years ago | |

I have a soft spot in my heart for this one.

http://colors.napcsweb.com/colorschemer/

There are several schemes to choose from (complimentary, contrasting, triadic, etc) and knobs to adjust. You get 5 colors to look at next to each other and 18 along the same lines that go together. The input is in HSV/RGB and every output color comes in hex.

dmnd 16 years ago | |

http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromacolor is a pretty nice resource for creating and finding pleasing colour schemes.

jackowayed 16 years ago |

It would be really cool if you indicated what parts of the file you're editing at the moment. Maybe like underlining all of them? I know you could just change it to some crazy color and see what changes, but then if you want it right back where it was, you can never get it perfectly back.

Also, I second the request for being able to paste in a config to base it off of (mostly so that if I make a config, then decide I love it except for 1 or 2 things but want to use your editor instead of messing with the color codes, I can use your editor to tweak it).

It's awesome as it is, though. Nice work :)

koenigdavidmj 16 years ago | |

Visual Studio has a sidebar that's grey for untouched lines. On lines that you edit, this sidebar turns yellow, and it turns green when you save and red for errors.

jackowayed 16 years ago | | |

Yeah, I thought about something like that (assuming I know what you mean), but since this is about parts of lines, not lines, I thought underlining would work better (especially since basically every line has keywords).

It's still a little difficult to indicate the minibuffer background, the frame border, etc, but I think those names are a little more obvious, and there's fewer of them.

vaporstun 16 years ago |

Where were you when I was hand-coding my current Emacs theme??

Great work!

My only suggestion is that you could display the lisp code for the theme below the code window so I could both see it update in real time and be able to export it without clicking the button.

Surely you don't have to implement this because it was likely a free-time project and it is infinitely better than anything I've ever seen that tries to accomplish this, (because I haven't seen anything that tried to do this and when you divide by zero, well...) but you asked for reviews and that is my sole critique.

ertug 16 years ago |

Awesome!

It would be really nice to see what others are creating.

What about saving our themes with a name on the site then the app can allow us to share it and vote it?

rbanffy 16 years ago |

Insanely cool. Thanks.

Some suggestions:

I would prefer a triangle-in-a-color-wheel arrangement for the color picker.

One nice addition too would be a complementary color generator with the same saturation-luminance.

Another would be having the #rrggbb color so it could be easily copied and pasted between settings.

But swill, as it is, it's awesome. Thank you very much!

beilabs 16 years ago |

Could be an idea to have a sample of the current color beside the string.

So, beside keywords, there would be a box filled in with the current color, instead of clicking each checkbox it would have a snapshot of all of the colors. Handy to reference them instead of looking at the sample code.

docgnome 16 years ago |

This is really cool! I'd second, third, whatever, the call for an import. It would also be neat if it was pluggable so when someone writes an emacs extension with custom faces, they could write a little snippet file to plugin to this to make those faces available.

jcsalterego 16 years ago |

Which versions of Emacs will the generated configs work under? (Emacs vs XEmacs, etc?)

Thanks!

avar 16 years ago | |

XEmacs is considered pretty dead at this point. Very few people bother to make new (or old) elisp programs XEmacs compatible these days.

And I'm hoping you're not one of the remaining 20 XEmacs users :)

jcsalterego 16 years ago | | |

Good point, I've lost track..

pogos 16 years ago | |

GNU Emacs 23.1 on Ubuntu. Haven't tested on other versions and platforms yet.

catch404 16 years ago |

Very cool, is it missing the seleced text colour?

pogos 16 years ago | |

fixed, thank you.

catch404 16 years ago | | |

Thanks! This is such a great tool :D

lambdom 16 years ago |

Other idea: Keep track of other people color theme. But, yes.. I use vim and textmate and I'm a bit jealous :) Good job!

zellux 16 years ago |

Really nice one, and it would be better if you could can more settings like fonts and mode-line-inactive.

lancerx 16 years ago |

suhweet! Thanks so much!! Someday, I'd like to be able to import the settings of an existing theme and tweak from there.

stuntmouse 16 years ago |

now if i could just figure out a way to change the background color of the active window, i'd be all set. nice job.

jrockway 16 years ago | |

Surprisingly, it's M-x set-background-color. You can also change the background color of the default face; same thing.

stuntmouse 16 years ago | | |

I should have been more specific. I'd like to change the background color of the active window to indicate which one has focus.

Your solution changes the background color for all windows.

sendos 16 years ago |

Simply awesome!

claymmm 16 years ago |

Brilliant!

gorm 16 years ago |

Awesome!

lifeisstillgood 16 years ago |

marvellous!

whatwhatwhat 16 years ago |

it is not incredibly user-friendly

mixmax 16 years ago | |

It fits emacs very well in that regard.

melling 16 years ago | | |

These icons look pretty straight forward.

http://aquamacs.org/

There is a nice File, Edit... menu that goes along with it.

Close your eyes and pretend the rest of the complexity doesn't exist and it will be no different than using Notepad, etc. When you want more, open your eyes a little.