vim
Add monochrome.vim and its template
This is by and large just a minor update of https://github.com/vim/colorschemes/pull/68 as I've cleaned up my workflow and fixed a couple warts in the template itself.
Do we need this now? All default colorschemes include _tcozero which would be essentially this on a broken terminal?
Not quite :
The intention behind _tcozero was to provide glass ttys or antiquated emulators with something less noisy than the mishmash of bold and underlined elements in vim's default fallback.
In the context of a broken environment, using _tcozero requires being aware
- that something is broken
- that it has to do with interactions between the local environment and the terminal emulator or multiplexer
- that
t_Coexists, why it exists, and how to use it.
The first point should be obvious, but let's be honest, we've all seen people complain about [insert utter nonsense] completely oblivious to the fact that nothing they were doing worked properly, or even made sense on a very basic level.
A catch-all generic version effectively circumvents the issue, by existing on every machine, in a readily-available form, provided the user knows about :colorscheme. Better discoverability, no need to remember arcane commands and so on.
I also like the idea of having a monochrome theme for any occasion. Is there anyone who likes my “retrocomputing” b/w color scheme from Colortemplate's templates directory? 😅 I like the “structural” parts of the screen (line numbers, tabs, vert splits, …) to be uniformly in reverse, possibly with underline (folded text)—but I understand that it's a very personal taste.
One thing I'd change in your monochrome, however: I would add underline to CursorLine.
I tend to prefer low noise, high signal solutions. Granted, that depends on what one's definition of "signal" is.
monochrome being initially derived from an early version of _tcozero, I removed all the state changes that weren't essential and would add lag on a serial terminal. Vim gets pretty brittle at 9600bps and below.
I can see a few corner cases where being able to tell at a glance what line the cursor is on in a different split on the slowest ssh connection in the universe would be useful, but it might clash with StatusLineNC and generally speaking I feel that the big blinking cursor ought to be enough.
The issue of an underline "covering up" an underscore is also very much a thing depending on how underlining is implemented in the terminal emulator and/or on the font used.
One thing I'd change in your monochrome, however: I would add underline to CursorLine
This is something I wanted to have too.
Considering I do explicit :set cursorline I would expect "some" visual difference for the current line.
On the other hand if this is an "emergency" colorscheme then it doesn't matter :)
I don't like it, but it's off by default, and @habamax made the case that there are ~~bloated atrocities~~ plugins out there that assume CursorLine is visible.
I was emailing with @romainl recently, and broached the idea of having a monochrome style theme included into vim proper. Having written my own (https://github.com/teoljungberg/vim-whitescale) - I'm intrigued how this or #78 comes into play.
@teoljungberg the goal of adding a monochrome colorscheme is to have an economical baseline colorscheme that would be usable everywhere, from &t_Co == 0 to GUI. Not relying on color for syntax highlighting is in our opinion what allows that kind of universality and also what disqualifies vim-whitescale for that specific use case.
Now, I guess there is nothing preventing the introduction of a low-color "light" colorscheme on principle. As long as it is written according to the best practices we haven't written yet, any colorscheme should be eligible, I think.
As long as it is written according to the best practices we haven't written yet
That made my day, thanks :-D
There's still the issue of discoverability and having to know about t_Co=0 if things are really, really broken, but I feel like the situation got better during the last 18 months. Probably a combination of the tweaks to colortemplate, and some of vim's own improvements in how it handles terminal emulators.
I've also managed to convert some of my friends who used to swear by syntax off to the 256c version of quiet, so I figure it works well enough. I'd much rather spend time cleaning up @romainl's dichromatic so we can ship it than keep chasing ghosts dressed like it's still 1978.