feat(highlight): update default color scheme #26334

echasnovski · 2023-11-30T18:13:14Z

2023-12-16 Edit: #26540 introduced some tweaks to the default color scheme based on the feedback. In particular, screenshots, palettes, and contrast ratios listed in this PR are now not up to date.

This PR addresses a long standing issue of suboptimal default color scheme. Here is the outline of what it proposes.

Design

Be "Neovim branded", i.e. follow outlined example as main reference from defaults: improved default color scheme #14790. This generally means to mostly have "green-blue" feel plus one/two colors reserved for very occasional user attention.
Be extra minimal for notermguicolors (256 colors) while allowing a bit more shades for when termguicolors is set (true colors). I really hope that this compromise will allow to coexist extreme minimalism of reference colors and a bit more variety with true colors.
Be accessible, i.e. have enough contrast ratio. This means to have at least 7 for Normal highlight group and 4.5 for some common cases (Visual, Comment with set 'cursorline', colored syntax, Diff*, Search).
Be dark and light variants a simple exchange of dark and light palettes (as this is easier to implement and requires less colors introduced).
Be usable, i.e. provide enough visual feedback for common objects.

Palette

Introduce two separate palettes: dark (NvimDark*) and light (NvimLight*).
Dark/light palette is used for background in dark/light color scheme and for foreground in light/dark color scheme. This introduces recognizable visual system without too standing out.
Actual computation of palettes is done in a perceptually uniform Oklch color space. I highly recommend this interactive picker/converter.
Each palette has the following colors (descriptions are for dark background; reverse for light one):
- Four shades of "colored" greys for general UI. In 256 colors they are exact greys; with termguicolors - shades of "cool" grey.
  - Dark ones (from darkest to lightest) are reserved as background for NormalFloat (considered as "black"), Normal (background), CursorLine, Visual.
  - Light ones (also from darkest to lightest) are reserved for Comment, StatusLine/TabLine, Normal (foreground), and color considered as "white".
- Hues for green, cyan, and red are modelled after reference color scheme: #87FFAF, #00E6E6, #D96D6A. Result have very similar hue but slightly different lightness and chroma (to be consistent with UI and palette).
- Hues for yellow, blue, and magenta are chosen such as to be visibly different.
Each palette color has the 256 colors variant with closest colors.

All colors are procedurally and objectively generated based on a handful of hyperparameters. Here is a link to the script (to run, it requires 'mini.colors' dependency).

Here is the data about palettes:

Hex palettes

Dark:
blue    = "#005078"
cyan    = "#007676"
green   = "#015825"
grey1   = "#0a0b10"
grey2   = "#1c1d23"
grey3   = "#2c2e33"
grey4   = "#4f5258"
magenta = "#4c0049"
red     = "#5e0009"
yellow  = "#6e5600"

Light:
blue    = "#9fd8ff"
cyan    = "#83efef"
green   = "#aaedb7"
grey1   = "#ebeef5"
grey2   = "#d7dae1"
grey3   = "#c4c6cd"
grey4   = "#9b9ea4"
magenta = "#ffc3fa"
red     = "#ffbcb5"
yellow  = "#f4d88c"

256 colors palettes

Dark:
blue    = 24
cyan    = 30
green   = 22
grey1   = 232
grey2   = 234
grey3   = 236
grey4   = 239
magenta = 53
red     = 52
yellow  = 58

Light:
blue    = 153
cyan    = 123
green   = 158
grey1   = 255
grey2   = 253
grey3   = 251
grey4   = 247
magenta = 189
red     = 217
yellow  = 222

Contrast ratios

dark_* are for dark color scheme, ligth_* - for light.

dark_blue         = 11
dark_comment      = 6.3
dark_comment_cur  = 5.1
dark_comment_vis  = 2.9
dark_cur_line     = 9.7
dark_cyan         = 12.5
dark_green        = 12.4
dark_magenta      = 11.6
dark_normal       = 12
dark_red          = 10.5
dark_visual       = 5.6
dark_yellow       = 12
light_blue        = 6.2
light_comment     = 5.6
light_comment_cur = 4.6
light_comment_vis = 2.9
light_cur_line    = 9.8
light_cyan        = 3.9
light_green       = 6.2
light_magenta     = 10.7
light_normal      = 12
light_red         = 10.1
light_visual      = 6.3
light_yellow      = 5

Highlight groups

Use greys for general UIs.
Use bold text for keywords (Statement highlight group). This is an important choice to increase accessibility for people with color deficiencies, as it doesn't rely on actual color.
Use green for strings, DiffAdd (as background), DiagnosticOK, and some minor text UI elements.
Use cyan as main syntax color, i.e. for function calls (Function), DiffText, DiagnosticInfo (and DiagnosticHint in 256 colors), and some minor text UI elements.
Use red to generally mean high user attention, i.e. errors. That is, ErrorMsg, DiffDelete, DiagnosticError.
Use (very sparingly) yellow only with true colors to mean mild user attention, i.e. warnings. That is, WarningMsg, and DiagnosticWarn. With 256 colors it falls back to red. One important exception to this is Search which has yellow background.
Use (very sparingly) blue as Identifier only with true colors. This gets used quite a lot, so it does not have fallback for 256 colors (to reduce noise).
Magenta is not used and here only for completeness to allow setting full 8 terminal colors (later).

Here are screenshots in many situations:

Screenshots

Dark, 256 colors:

Dark, 256 colors, diff:

Dark, 256 colors, tree-sitter:

Dark, 256 colors, tree-sitter + LSP:

Dark, true colors:

Dark, true colors, diff:

Dark, true colors, tree-sitter:

Dark, true colors, tree-sitter+LSP:

Light, 256 colors:

Light, 256 colors, diff:

Light, 256 colors, tree-sitter:

Light, 256 colors, tree-sitter + LSP:

Light, true colors:

Light, true colors, diff:

Light, true colors, tree-sitter:

Light, true colors, tree-sitter+LSP:

@justinmk, as you are the one making merging decision, I am mentioning you here. To be fully upfront, here are the changes which I think you might not like (yet I still ask you to try them and reconsider):

Search has yellow background. I tried various combinations, but having any other basic color (grey, green, cyan) as background will blend in more than it should. I tried reverse=true, but it looks not really good and has issue with not visible cursor (which is very often also reversed).
- As yellow is not used anywhere in the syntax, having it as Search makes sense.
There are small number of yellow (Diagnostic*Warn, SpellCap) and blue colors added with termguicolors. See screenshots.
Diff* colors come from "background" palette. Those have similar lightness to background and stand out mostly via saturation (and not saturation + lightness). Reference examples in defaults: improved default color scheme #14790 didn't have such colors available, so I decided to try them here. They do look good.

I would like this to be a present to Neovim for its 10-th anniversary (which is in two months, according to 72cf89b). Hope to have a discussion with eventual green light on actual color scheme being mergeable. After that I'll fix (probably literal) hundreds of failing tests (I patched some hanging ones, but couldn't see the finish of make test due to timeout).

Fixes #14790.
Resolves #24253.

src/nvim/highlight_group.c

justinmk · 2023-12-01T00:40:07Z

Let's move quickly on this, @echasnovski you've been a heroic custodian of this topic, and it's a 2-way door--this is a good foundation for future improvements. Thank you!

Some minor requests:

Most of your PR notes should be pasted into a new help file at doc/dev_theme.txt, so we can have guidelines as we develop the theme.
- The "Highlight groups" notes especially are perfect.
- Also in the commit message!
Hyperlinks should be underlined, as God intended (and github just noticed after 10 years 😂 ).
- Probably also :help links, but can wait for now.

Be accessible, i.e. have enough contrast ratio.

Yes. We should also consider bg that is closer black/white.

Search has yellow background. I tried various combinations, but having any other basic color (grey, green, cyan) as background will blend in more than it should.

Definitely not a blocker, though I'll mention that years ago I had yellow Search and eventually found it wasn't needed (the block background stands out pretty well, to start with).

After that I'll fix (probably literal) hundreds of failing tests

We can ship the old Vim colors as a builtin vim theme. So we can force :colorscheme vim in the test runner, in order to unblock this first PR. Though I agree (in a followup PR) we should update mosts tests (except where there's an extreme amount of churn--then just do a local :colorscheme vim in before_each).

justinmk

💯 Let's do it

echasnovski · 2023-12-01T08:22:29Z

Thanks for approving!

  * The "Highlight groups" notes especially are perfect.
  * Also in the commit message!

Will do!

* Hyperlinks should be underlined, as God intended (and github just noticed after 10 years 😂 ).

Not sure what to do extra here. There seems to be only one group related to linking (@text.uri) and it was already underlined.

Yes. We should also consider bg that is closer black/white.

I basically chose lightness 13 from the reference #1e1e1e. Although making background more extreme would allow addressing one small issue for light color scheme (there comments are a bit visually similar to normal text; all good for dark), it introduces another bigger issue.

Basically, it should be too dark because background for floating windows are darker than normal background. So to make them visually separable, it shouldn't be too black/white. Of course, floating windows can be made lighter than normal (essentially switch normal and floating backgrounds), but it would mean that PMenu and CursorLine would have high contrast ratio. Which is not really good, in my opinion.

That said, all colors already meet standards outlined at the beginning (except cyan text for light theme, but that is because there isn't really such thing as "dark saturated cyan").

We can ship the old Vim colors as a builtin vim theme. So we can force :colorscheme vim in the test runner, in order to unblock this first PR. Though I agree (in a followup PR) we should update mosts tests (except where there's an extreme amount of churn--then just do a local :colorscheme vim in before_each).

That certainly makes things easier! I am still committed to update all tests to make them proper if general core consensus decides so.

glepnir · 2023-12-01T09:53:51Z

Here's the truecolor palette used in the screenshots for easy reference:

dark:

#005078
#007676
#015825
#0a0b10
#1c1d23
#2c2e33
#4f5258
#4c0049
#5e0009
#6e5600

light:

#9fd8ff
#83efef
#aaedb7
#ebeef5
#d7dae1
#c4c6cd
#9b9ea4
#ffc3fa
#ffbcb5
#f4d88c

bfredl · 2023-12-01T10:59:36Z

So we can force :colorscheme vim in the test runner, in order to unblock this first PR. Though I agree (in a followup PR) we should update mosts tests (except where there's an extreme amount of churn--then just do a local :colorscheme vim in before_each).

I agree with this plan. Updating the tests should be done eventually, but it will be a huge project, and it is better to unblock this PR by using :colorscheme vim generously (or globally) for most of test/functional for now.

dundargoc · 2023-12-01T11:08:22Z

This seems like a controversial feature. Maybe we should wait for more approvals before moving forward with this?

gpanders · 2023-12-01T12:47:34Z

Don’t forget a news.txt entry.

echasnovski · 2023-12-01T13:04:57Z

Don’t forget a news.txt entry.

And 'vim_diff.txt', yes.

echasnovski · 2023-12-01T16:04:04Z

I have force pushed the changes. In actual color scheme I only changed TermCursorNC to link to NONE instead of TermCursor (to make some tests pass).

There are still failing tests which I'd need help resolving, as they are somewhat too deep into source and test code. I'll try figuring something out.

Otherwise, documentation should be all which requested.

zeertzjq · 2023-12-02T01:45:25Z

Also needs colorscheme vim in test/old/testdir/setup.vim, after the tlunmenu *.

runtime/doc/dev_theme.txt

runtime/doc/vim_diff.txt

test/functional/core/main_spec.lua

runtime/doc/dev_theme.txt

runtime/doc/news.txt

runtime/doc/vim_diff.txt

echasnovski · 2023-12-02T15:26:59Z

@clason, @zeertzjq: All review notes are addressed. Thanks for the pointers!

clason · 2023-12-03T10:29:17Z

Thank you, @echasnovski, for your hard work and patience in seeing this through! What a lovely (early) birthday present :)

justinmk · 2023-12-03T13:17:03Z

runtime/colors/default.vim


-" This is the default color scheme.  It doesn't define the Normal
-" highlighting, it uses whatever the colors used to be.
+" This is the default color scheme.


Should mention something like

See :help dev_theme

Should we mention the Nvim* colors at :help gui-colors ?

Relates to default colorscheme change in neovim [#26334](neovim/neovim#26334)

mrcjkb · 2023-12-15T20:38:08Z

Update

The below comment appears to be specific to the colorscheme. I can't reproduce the behaviour with catppuccin.
Leaving it here in case someone else comes across this.

I've noticed some broken tree-sitter highlighting and git bisected it to this PR.

Specifically, Neovim used to highlight according to the last match in the highlights.scm file.
(I've been told this is the indended behaviour - and not to use priorities).

Before this PR:

Notice how spec matches @variable.haskell last and is highlighted accordingly

After this PR:

Now spec is highlighted as @function.haskell

I'm not sure if this is known, and if there's already an issue for it (I couldn't find one).
I'm also not 100 % sure it's not an issue that's specific to the colorscheme I'm using (material.nvim).
Since it's caused by this change, I thought I'd comment here before opening an issue 😄

clason · 2023-12-15T20:55:53Z

Yes, treesitter groups have yet to be adapted; that is ongoing work (please read the description and open issues and PRs)

Friendly reminder: master is not guaranteed to be usable, if greater changes need to be carried out across multiple PRs.

src/nvim/highlight_group.c

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defaults: improved default color scheme #14790

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echasnovski force-pushed the default-colorscheme branch from 7266a64 to 1ae7898 Compare December 1, 2023 16:01

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echasnovski mentioned this pull request Dec 2, 2023

Starting with -E flag doesn't fully redraw #26362

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echasnovski force-pushed the default-colorscheme branch from 583f1b3 to f8277de Compare December 2, 2023 15:24

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zeertzjq changed the title ~~Update default color scheme~~ feat(highlight): update default color scheme Dec 3, 2023

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Default color scheme follow up #26369

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The new default colorscheme breaks legacy vim colorscheme: workarounds and future steps? #26378

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The default colorscheme should only pull from the 0-16 terminals colors with notermguicolors #26385

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Replace deprecated VertSplit with WinSeparator navarasu/onedark.nvim#195

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fix: clear highlight groups in the new beautiful default Neovim theme mikesmithgh/kitty-scrollback.nvim#93

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bug: window separators are not highlighted correctly on Neovim master EdenEast/nightfox.nvim#386

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feat(highlight): tweak default color scheme #26540

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fix(group): WinSeperator defined along side VertSplit

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Relates to default colorscheme change in neovim [#26334](neovim/neovim#26334)

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fix(group): WinSeperator defined along side VertSplit EdenEast/nightfox.nvim#387

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fix(group): WinSeperator defined along side VertSplit (#387)

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Relates to default colorscheme change in neovim [#26334](neovim/neovim#26334)

mrcjkb mentioned this pull request Dec 15, 2023

tree-sitter highlights broken since introduction of Neovim (nightly) default colourscheme marko-cerovac/material.nvim#188

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icholy mentioned this pull request Dec 31, 2023

Control highlights broken in neovim nightly rcarriga/nvim-dap-ui#315

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vim/neovim does not fill terminal since it only aligns to characters #16572

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test: Use default 'background' in functional tests #9262

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fix: LightYellow and LightCyan colors not found tjdevries/colorbuddy.nvim#46

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use terminal colorscheme as default if not install plugin color scheme #27994

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Update tests to use default color scheme #28601

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feat(highlight): update default color scheme #26334

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Design

Palette

Highlight groups

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Update

Before this PR:

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