about every two months I’ll think “maybe I should give #neovim colorschemes a try, instead of using the thrown-together collection of horrifying colorscheme hacks that I’ve been building over several years”

and then I’ll try the most popular colorschemes and see huge glaring issues (for my specific preferences) in all of them, and realize:

• I could fix all of these issues with my own colorscheme hacks
• but if I did this, I would basically be right back where I started

and that’s why instead of a neovim colorscheme I have a series of hacks

my #neovim is ugly as fuck and I like it that way. everything is a unique color, everything quickly stands out if I’m looking for it, and there aren’t too many situations where text can have low contrast (although there are still some, and I’m not sure what to do about those situations yet. but I’ll probably figure something out eventually)

@kasdeya Good luck 👍.

this might sound weird but I think the problem is that the popular neovim colorschemes are just trying way too hard to look aesthetic. everything is trying to be subtle and understated and nearly invisible. and I hate when UIs do that. I think that aesthetics and UI usability are often at odds with each other, and personally I’d pick usability every time

if a UI element is important, I want it to be highly visible and loud. if I’ll ever want to be able to see something at a glance, I want it to be a color that’s unique to just that element alone, with a unique icon silhouette as well. but all of these colorschemes are like 4 accent colors and then 14 shades of the same desaturated background. and the way that they style basic UI elements like the borders between windows makes them basically invisible for some reason? even though resizing those borders is a very important part of nearly any neovim workflow? I don’t get it

@kasdeya I use One Dark for pretty much every editor. Neovim, VSCode, etc. It's the only theme I could find that had vibrant, distinct colors and also had good highlighting in general for a bunch of different languages.

But my terminal colors are fully custom and I've never found any theme that was as good.

I hate the trend of understated, muted colors. I want syntax highlighting to be vibrant and distinct.

@kasdeya forgot I actually put my custom terminal colorscheme in a github repo. I should move it over to codeberg...

https://github.com/emberquill/colors

@emberquill oohh I really love how this looks! I might use this actually

@kasdeya I wish I could remember where the original colors came from. I started with someone else's color scheme and tweaked it a little bit (made the magenta more pink and I think the cyan is a little greener).

But yeah, the goal was "vibrant and distinct but still pretty." Which is surprisingly hard to find in other color schemes. So many people seem to want like... multiple shades of blue instead of distinct colors.