63 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
63 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
Kalolo is a dark 256-colors scheme for the [kakoune](https://kakoune.org/) editor, designed with usability and consistency in mind.
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Features
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========
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- Selections and status line are in shades of yellows in normal mode and of blues in insert mode.
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- Selections let the syntax coloring appear ("alpha blending").
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- Cursor(s) and status line give an immediate visual clue on the mode:
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- Insert mode cursors are in shade of blues, normal mode cursors in shades of yellow.
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- Status line background color matches the cursors shade.
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- Primary selection, secondary selection, primary cursor, secondary cursor and
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end-of-line cursors all have slightly different colors.
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- It tries to stay semantically consistent:
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- Green is only used for comments (because comments are important),
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- with documentation in bold (because documentation is very important),
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- and strings (because messages are often close to comments).
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- Variable-related objects are in blues.
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- Operator and delimiters are (lightly) highlighted, to ease the visual parsing.
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- Attributes are in yellow.
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- Builtins keyword are slightly more highlighted than normal text, to allow
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for an immediate visual typo checking.
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- Keywords are in red, with flow-related ones (if, for, etc.) in bold.
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"kalolo" (New-Caledonia familiar adj.) means "beautiful, cute".
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Dependencies
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============
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Some faces depends on additional highlight keywords: `flow`, `state` and `Search`.
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Screenshots
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===========
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Rationale
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=========
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Color schemes are often perceived as a matter of taste.
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While this is true in essence, there are still some usability guidelines that may be followed.
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Most of color schemes for text editors show some of the following anti-patterns:
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- themes with too few colors (e.g. the default theme for Eclipse),
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- fancy rainbows which tries to pack so many colors on each lines that it becomes difficult to parse the text visually (e.g. the "one" theme for Atom),
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- use of colors without semantic consistency (e.g. some control-flow keywords are red, some are blue),
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- a lack of understanding of what information are important (e.g. making comments less visible),
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- no visual clue on the current status of the (modal) editor (e.g. grey status bar, single-color cursors).
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Kalolo tries to address those kind of problems.
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Limitations
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===========
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- So far, Kalolo only exists as a dark theme (but contributions are welcomed).
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- The design is limited by a compromise with the syntax parsing engine: less keyword types necessarily means less color shades. Adding more keyword types would mean more configuration.
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