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Base16 – architecture for building color themes for many apps (chriskempson.com)
83 points by smartmic on Dec 10, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments


My favorite ones generated from this are the Base2Tone family of themes: https://base2t.one/ (I'm partial to Space Dark)

I added coverage for gnome terminal and mate-terminal (when I was trying unsuccessfully to not hate linux UI) and it was super easy to do. If you're interested in color schemes, base16 is a very useful (if definitely hacky) framework for developing on.


This looks nice. How on earth do people come across these?



good question! I have no idea how I came across it, nor how one would do so reliably.


Shameless plug: I used base16 to generate a million random color themes: https://www.syntaxenvy.com/


This is a cool project! One question: why just dark themes?


No real reason. I was hoping people would pass the link around as something of a gag, but I didn't get much traffic when I shared it, so it's in maintenance mode now.


I used to use Base16 for years, and even wrote the Hexchat conversion script for Base16. It just... I dunno, it isn't exactly what I want. I want a centralized system that produces everything from a single repo, not 9000 repos that all do something slightly different.


There's also: https://rainglow.io/


Yesterday there was a post about the Dracula theme ... and I guess I was not the only one who thought that there is probably a project that could "translate" a colortheme to configurations for many applications.

Is this it?


It’s not as polished. The base16 aspect just comes up with the color swath, but you rely on community contributions to port that into different app themes. For example, the VS Code themes look terrible. The way they choose colors for the UI just isn’t appealing. I think base16 has a standard, like “05 is used for menus” but that doesn’t translate very well.

I think it’s good for syntax highlighting, but I had a lot of difficulty translating it into UI themes in a way that I liked.




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