Base16 Shell

See the Base16 repository for more information. These scripts were built with Base16 Builder PHP.

A shell script to change your shell's default ANSI colors but most importantly, colors 17 to 21 of your shell's 256 colorspace (if supported by your terminal). This script makes it possible to honor the original bright colors of your shell (e.g. bright green is still green and so on) while providing additional base16 colors to applications such as Vim.

Use Cases

• You want to use a *.256.* variant of a Terminal theme designed to honor the original bright colors.
• You prefer to use a script instead of a terminal emulator theme to color your shell.
• You use this script to have different colorschemes appear on different SSH sessions.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell.git ~/.config/base16-shell

Configuration

We're going to use the example theme of base16_default for the following instructions. Replace with your desired theme.

Once you have got base16 setup you can try applying themes in your shell by typing base16_, letting autocomplete show you the options, then executing the theme you want to try.

Bash/ZSH

Add following lines to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

# Base16 Shell
BASE16_SHELL="$HOME/.config/base16-shell/"
[ -n "$PS1" ] && \
    [ -s "$BASE16_SHELL/profile_helper.sh" ] && \
        source "$BASE16_SHELL/profile_helper.sh"
        
base16_default

If you're using ZSH + plug

You won't need to do the git clone above. Add the below commands to your ~/.zshrc instead. (This will likely work for other plugin managers too).

# before `zplug load`
zplug chriskempson/base16-shell, from:github

# after `zplug load`
base16_materia

Fish

Add following lines to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

# Base16 Shell
if status --is-interactive
    set BASE16_SHELL "$HOME/.config/base16-shell/"
    source "$BASE16_SHELL/profile_helper.fish"
end

base16_materia

Base16-Vim Users

the BASE16_THEME environment variable will set to your current colorscheme, you just need to add the following to your vimrc: i.e. (remove the base16colorspace line if not needed)

if exists('$BASE16_THEME')
      \ && (!exists('g:colors_name') || g:colors_name != 'base16-$BASE16_THEME')
    let base16colorspace=256
    colorscheme base16-$BASE16_THEME
endif

tmux users

Add the following line to ~/.tmux.config to passthrough color escape sequences. (As of version 3.3 the passthrough of escape sequences is turned off by default)

set -g allow-passthrough 1

Troubleshooting

Run the included colortest script and check that your colour assignments appear correct. If your teminal does not support the setting of colours in within the 256 colorspace (e.g. Apple Terminal), colours 17 to 21 will appear blue.

If colortest is run without any arguments e.g. ./colortest the hex values shown will correspond to the default scheme. If you'd like to see the hex values for a particular scheme pass the file name of the theme as the arguement e.g. ./colortest base16-ocean.sh.

Inverted blacks and whites

This is the expected behaviour when using a light theme: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell/issues/150