technicolor

What is this?

technicolor offers a uniform API to access a specified collection of colors defined in your currently-enabled theme.

See this accompanying blog post detailing the problem, solution, and example usage.

The Problem

Let’s say you use DOOM themes and you use the foreground color from the doom theme palette somewhere in elisp. That’s great! DOOM themes offer an API for that: (doom-color 'fg).

But you also use modus-themes sometimes, and you want to use the modus foreground color. No problem, modus offers an API too: (modus-themes-get-color-value 'fg-main). Oops, the symbol of the color is different, and the function to access the color is different. I guess you can add some branches in your elisp that determine if the current theme is a DOOM or modus theme…

..except you also sometimes use catppuccin-theme, and ef-themes, and…

What to do? Add branches ad nauseam to cover every possible theme you might have active?

technicolor hopes to solve this issue by letting users define a “universal color palette” in which they can access these colors from any currently-set theme coming from a list of themes the user specifies with a single API.

Configured properly, the above situation would reduce to (technicolor-get-color 'foreground).

Using technicolor

technicolor comes with some limited configuration associated to a few popular theme packs:

• DOOM themes
• Prot’s themes (modus-, ef-, standard-)
• catppuccin theme

These are good starting points, but the user should still peer into the color palettes and decide how they want to map colors. Here is an example:

Let’s say you want to access the foreground color in elisp for the DOOM themes and modus themes. You can set this in the technicolor-colors list:

(setq technicolor-colors '(foreground))

The theme’s above have the following accessors we can use:

Doom themes

doom-color

Prot themes

*-themes-get-color-value

The DOOM themes use fg for the foreground color, while Prot uses fg-main, so we map our “universal” palette name foreground to these symbols in their configurations.

(setq technicolor-themes '(("^doom-.*" doom-color '((foreground . fg)))
                           ("^modus-.*" modus-themes-get-color-value
                                                  '((foreground . fg-main)))
                           ...))

You can now access the current foreground color with (technicolor-get-color 'foreground) provided your theme matches one of the above. Note we have reproduced a subset of the default config provided.

That configuration will match all doom themes and all modus themes; you can set per-theme rules on color mappings from the universal palette by refining the regex:

' ...
  ("^modus-operandi" modus-themes-get-color-value '((mappings . here)))
  (("^modus-vivendi" modus-themes-get-color-value '((different . mappings)))
   ...)

Extend the value of technicolor-colors to any colors that you’d like to use. If you give appropriate mappings for each group of themes, technicolor will find them.

Note that if all of your themes provide the same symbol for a certain color, as is common for generic colors like “red”, “blue”, etc, you don’t need to specify the mapping from the universal palette (but they should still be in technicolor-colors).

Theme accessors

technicolor depends on a theme’s accessor to retrieve colors. An accessor for a color should take in a color symbol and return the hexadecimal color that the theme defines for that color, or nil or unspecified if no such color exists in the palette. DOOM themes and Prot’s themes ship with their own accessors.

If the theme you want to include does include one, you will have to write your own. With varying degrees of munging, this is possible (e.g. the catppuccin color accessor defined in technicolor.el).

Installation

Via straight:

(straight-use-package
 '(technicolor :type git :host github :repo "aatmunbaxi/technicolor"))

or for DOOM emacs users in your packages.el:

(package! technicolor :recipe (:host github :repo "aatmunbaxi/technicolor"))

If your package manager does not support git recipes and you use use-package, you can clone the repo and place the following in your configuration:

(use-package technicolor
  :load-path "path/to/cloned/technicolor")

along with any use-package configuration.

Color Manipulation

technicolor can also perform basic manipulation of colors, using the same ethos of accessing the colors via technicolor-get-color. They are listed below. Essentially, they wrap the color library.

• technicolor-darken
• technicolor-lighten
• technicolor-complement
• technicolor-gradient
• technicolor-saturate
• technicolor-desaturate
• technicolor-blend