path: root/2024/captions/emacsconf-2024-color--colour-your-emacs-with-ease--ryota--main.vtt

WEBVTT captioned by sachac

NOTE Introduction

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Hi, EmacsConf. This is "Colour your Emacs with ease".

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I'm Ryota Sawada, and today's agenda is:

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start with a brief introduction.

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I will be talking about colours quite a bit.

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What colours do you like?

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Colour spaces and some packages such

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as color.el, ct.el. I'll be touching on a theme called

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Hasliberg theme, which I created,

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before wrapping up the talk.

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A quick introduction about the talk. The slide is

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available as an Org mode file at Codeberg. If you're

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looking at it from Org mode, you probably want to have

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rainbow mode turned on for the best viewing. This is the

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case with the presentation today. I'm Ryota Sawada and I'm

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available at rytswd at usual places.

NOTE What colour do you like?

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What colour do you like?

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You might be able to tell I like orange. That's

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the colour that I use often.

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Emacs gives me all the control I want,

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so naturally I wanted to make it aesthetically

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pleasing to my taste, which meant that

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I would like to have a dark theme, subtle theme

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with orange as a main accent colour, but not

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too orange, so not everything very orange.

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Maybe use another blue-ish colour

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as another accent. Note that this presentation is

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based on the Hasliberg theme, more on that

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later. But when I started my Emacs journey, I didn't start

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with creating a new theme from get-go. I started with a theme

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called Nova Theme. I really liked it. I made a few tweaks

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around Org Mode and headings, so that they were a bit more was

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my liking, which was around orange being sprinkled across.

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I got to it very nice looking and I really liked it, but when

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I started a lot of coding tasks with it, I realized one

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thing: that it was very colourful, and in a way, distracting.

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it actually wasn't about Nova Theme's fault. It was just

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many editors, including Emacs and VS Code and other editors

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and modern themes, are filled with colours. Let's have a

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look. At the top left, you can see Nova theme with a bit of a

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pale greenish background with a few colours. Purple,

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pink, blue, green. You can see some colours like that with

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Nova theme. Nice looking colours, but still colourful. Modus

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Vivendi Tinted, bottom left, is also very nice looking

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modern theme, but quite colourful. The same can be said

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for ef-themes, owl edition at top right,

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and Doom Noe as another, bottom right.

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That led me to think: how can I make my code editing

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and coding tasks not too distracting, and I can focus on

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writing code. That was something I could manage with Org

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Mode, where I just specifically, basically used orange

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shades and not too much more. That's what you're seeing at

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the moment. I wanted to do something similar with coding

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and any general code. That led me to the journey of

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creating my own theme.

NOTE Colour spaces: HSL, LCH , and more

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But before going to the theme, I need to talk about colour

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spaces. sRGB, standard RGB, is probably something that

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many people are familiar with. HSL is for hue, saturation,

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lightness. LCH is for luminance or lightness, chroma, and

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hue. Those are the colour spaces probably common used in

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various spaces, but when it comes to perceptual uniformity,

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there is an important difference between the colour

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spaces. Human perception of colour is not very

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straightforward. We can see in the reference here...

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Let's have a look.

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At the top you can see the shade coming from left

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green to the right blue,

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and in the top image, you can see half of

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it, perhaps, is very similar green colour

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and then when it comes to blue,

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you can see more of the different colour gradients

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coming into play. The bottom colour space is based on a

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perceptually uniform colour space, which gives us a bit more

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evenly distributed colour gradient, which will be

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something more suitable for deciding on the theme setup and

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the colour setup, where you can have various themes that are

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defined for human perceptions.

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Perceptual uniformity is important. For that, it is

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important to mention about CIE, or "International

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Commission of Illumination" in English. They created

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important colour spaces called CIE XYZ which was from 1931,

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CIELAB, and LUV, 1976,

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respectively. Those are the colour spaces used in various

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fields and industries and still relevant. There is a

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quite a bit that you can read up on.

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I'm not a colour expert so have some references here,

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but the TLDR of all of that is

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consider using LCH variants over RGB or HSL

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for better perceptual uniformity.

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Specifically CIE Lab-based LCH,

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which is often called Lab LCH

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or just LCH. CIELUV-based LCH

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is called LUV LCH. There is a new rather modern LCH setup

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called OK LCH which is based on OK Lab.

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So those are the colour spaces

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that are worth looking at when it comes to creating

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shades.

NOTE color.el and ct.el

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How do you create shades? Color.el and ct.el are

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great solutions. You can create shades and different

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colours based on RGB and hex. You can see in the red example

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here, FF0000 is a bright red. You can darken it by providing

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less red values like CC or 88. You can see that the colours

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are slightly darker than the FF0000. But what if you are

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working with the complex colours such as FBB151, this

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particular orange? That's where color.el, ct.el come

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into play. Color.el is a built-in package in Emacs,

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so you can use it by just requiring it.

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color-darken-name and

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providing the colour with the hex value with 40%

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gives you a darker orange

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without doing too much of a colour computation

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by hand. This hex value is something that Emacs

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understands and rainbow mode does as well. When it comes

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to ct.el, it's not a built-in solution, but it's more

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versatile. It works with various colour spaces so you can

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see that ct-edit-hsl-l-dec by 40% would give

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us a darker colour by 40%. We can also use LCH variant which

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can use the LCH colour spaces for darkening the colour. This

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results in slightly different colours for this particular

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orange, but if you're working with the green or blue or some

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other colours, it might be worth looking at LCH variant

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rather than other colour spaces.

NOTE Hasliberg theme

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With that, let's have a look at Hasliberg theme.

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This is a theme that I created personally

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and the name is based on the Swiss Alps

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and with the following ideas in mind. It focuses

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on setting up shades. Shades, by that...

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You can see how the top

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of the heading here is a bright orange colour, and

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other orange colours, this heading and this heading

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are based on the top

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orange colour and then giving some shade and the luminance

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adjustment essentially. It follows a pattern from web

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design and tailwind colour shades are a great example that

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you can have a look.

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It does not use ct.el as it aims to be fully

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dependency free and does not consider colour contrast for

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accessibility. This is because it's personal and I

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don't have that particular need.

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This is based on LuvLCh rather

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than LAB LCH, and that's another reason

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why I didn't use ct.el,

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and it is highly experimental. But the code is

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available at Codeberg and GitHub just for your reference.

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Let's see Hasliberg theme in action. This is the theme

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that we were looking at for org-mode as well, but for the

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code, in this case Elisp. You can see that the colour is

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mostly white and blue with orange sprinkled across for

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string input. You can see some pink showing up as well.

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Essentially, all the colour setup is done by shades, so most of

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it is based on white or neutral, and there will be lighter and

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darker variants that can be set for the primary colour of blue.

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You can see the darker and brighter and lighter colours

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being used. With that shade setup, I only have to provide a

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few colours as the base colours. From there, I can define the

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shades for the theme setup, which leads to creating a more

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monotonic colour setup, where this one is a very monotonic,

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very subtle difference of white colours used for the base

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colours. I don't have to make too many changes to the colour

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setup. I just have to provide the base colours that are

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different. The same can be said for this orange, very orange

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colour theme, which is based on the base colours of

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orange-like colours and gives the shade of various

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different setup. This means that I can use Hasliberg

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Theme Nature colour palette, and that gives me more of a green

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based colour where all the base colours are set up with a

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greenish colour setup.

NOTE Wrap up

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With that, I would like to wrap up with a few ideas when

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adjusting themes and working with colours. Maybe consider

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using CIELAB, CIELUV, or OKLab-based colour spaces that

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would give you different shades which are easier to work

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with for human perceptions. color.el and ct.el can be a

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great tool for making shades and working with colour spaces.

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Hasliberg theme is yet another theme, highly personal

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and experimental, but could be an inspiration for your

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theme journey. With that, why not sprinkle your Emacs with

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your favourite colours? Thank you.