My personal collection of neovim colorschemes with treesitter and semantic highlights support.

All colorschemes have a dark and light variant; the appropriate one will be used when you set background=dark or set background=light

Overview

Ruby dark

Opal dark

Silver light

All variants

Light	Dark
simonvic_opal
simonvic_ruby
simonvic_ruby_monochrome
simonvic_silver

Customization

Each colorscheme is a lua module that returns a Colorscheme with which you can :build() a new one using it as a base, and then :apply()

For example, creating a new emerald theme based on ruby is as simple as

require("simonvic.colorscheme.ruby")
	:build({
		name = "emerald",
		palette = {
			accent = "#00ff00"
		}
	})
	:apply()

You can also override the groups

require("simonvic.colorscheme.ruby")
	:build({
		name = "emerald",
		groups = {
			Keyword = { fg = "#00ff00", bold = true }
		}
	})
	:apply()

Tip

To "delete" a field from a group, you can use an empty string

DiffAdd = { bg = "" }

If you need to override the palette and use the resulting merged palette in the groups, you can use a function that takes a palette and returns the groups

require("simonvic.colorscheme.ruby")
	:build({
		name = "emerald",
		palette = {
			accent = "#00ff00"
		}
		groups = function(palette)
			return {
				Keyword = { fg = palette.accent, bold = true }
			}
		end
	})
	:apply()

Rationale

A Colorscheme is made of three things:

• name
• palette: abstract collection of colors
• groups: actual highlight groups definitions

Palette

A palette mainly consists in accent colors, UI component colors, text colors, main syntax colors and some more

• Accent colors represents your main favorite color shades.

• UI components are treated as if they were "overlaying layers"; each layer has a respective zdepth_n color

• Most colors in a palette have some +n and -n shade variants (e.g. accent_4 (+4), accent__4 (-4)), where the n represents how much that shade of color blends with or stands out from the background.

  For example, with a dark background, accent__4 would be a very dark shade of accent, while accent_2 a slightly bright shade of accent

Groups

Syntax highlight groups follow some rules:

• keywords are what stand out more from the background: they are the main elements that describe how your code is structured; if you were to squint your eyes and look at a code snippet from far away, you should still be able to distinguish a for loop statement from a class or function declaration

• similar rationale for punctuation: for example, in an array or function arguments list, you should easily recognize where each entry begins and ends.

  insert r/programmerhumor missing semicolon joke here

• keywords and punctuation, and therefore the structure of your code, should have the same or similar color

• metakeywords, such as preprocessor directives in C or annotations in Java, should have a very distinctive color from the rest of the code, as they should feel extraneous to it.

• literals (e.g. strings, numbers, booleans) should all have the same or a similar spectrum of color, that somewhat stands out from the rest of the code

• comments: a possibly controversial take, but comments should blend more rather than standing out; 90% of the time you read code, and comments should not hinder you when coding. Reading comments should be the exception.

• same applies to documentation comments, albeit with a different shade of the same color.

  You probably read docs more than comments, but you usually do it in your editor UI, which supposedly gives you a better experience by rendering whatever markup language is used. Reading "raw" docs should be the exception.