User guide / Themes

Built-in themes

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About the themes

ocean-dark and ocean-light are one palette seen from two grounds, drawn from a breaking wave: deep water is the ground, the wave’s turquoise face is the accent, and foam and sky are what the palette lightens toward.

• Every role is the same hue at the same contrast in both variants.
• Both are deliberately soft: text reads at 8.6:1 against the background rather than 13:1, the step terafox-soft takes. Keywords and strings sit just below ordinary text, and comments at 3.9:1.
• They cannot soften further without text becoming hard to read on the shared Git diff grounds.
• Mode carets and status labels use turquoise Normal, coral Insert, apricot Select, indigo Command, and orchid Replace. Insert and Select take their red/orange pairing from terafox, adjusted for the ocean grounds.
• Other warm colours are the error red, which one-key jump labels share, the warning amber, and the Git gutter and diff colours every built-in theme shares.

ember-dark and ember-light are Runyte’s branded pair, named for the red they carry on a neutral gray ground.

• Modes: green Normal, red Insert, pink Select, purple Replace, blue Command.
• They are the only built-in themes that set command, so palette command names are blue while the accent stays on borders and headings.
• Selections differ by hue alone: a blue secondary against a pink primary that matches the Select caret.
• The dark theme takes its surface, text, and accent from runyte.com. The light theme uses darker forms of the same hues on light gray.

dark and light are the neutral pair: no palette identity, just a legible option for each kind of terminal.

matrix is a green-phosphor terminal theme.

• An almost-black ground with a green cast, a saturated code green for keywords and the accent, and a ladder of greens for everything else.
• Blue is rare on purpose, so blue things are the ones worth finding: azure for functions, directories, and Command mode; cyan for types; indigo for the Replace caret.
• Ordinary selections are deep green; the primary selection is blue.
• Only errors and one-key jump labels are red, apart from the Git gutter and diff colours every built-in theme shares.

neon is a near-black ground under a red frame and a cyan interior, shaped like a heads-up game menu.

• Red draws structure: pane borders, keywords, tags, errors, and the resting caret.
• Cyan marks what you act on: calls, directories, and the Insert caret.
• Acid green is kept for strings.
• Text reads at 9.7:1, about as bright as ocean-dark; the ratio is higher only because the ground is darker.
• The red stays darker than the other colours. Lightening a saturated red to match them turns it pink and loses the frame.
• The primary selection is the Select caret’s acid green, darkened to a ground and kept at the yellow end of green so it is not read as a Git “added” line. Ordinary selections are blue. A deep red selection was rejected because it looked like a deleted line.

Nightfox themes use the canonical palettes from Nightfox .

• nordfox is a cool Nord-derived dark theme.
• nordfox-warm keeps that base with brighter dimmed text, pink secondary selections, and yellow primary selections.
• terafox uses deep blue-green backgrounds and warm accents.
• terafox-soft is Runyte’s own variant: terafox with text lowered from 13.1:1 to 8.6:1 contrast, for long reading without glare. Identifiers, operators, and punctuation move by the same amount; everything else is unchanged.

atom-one-light follows Atom’s official One Light UI and One Light syntax palettes.

github-light follows projekt0n’s GitHub Theme for Neovim .

Zenbones themes use the palettes and generated highlight colours from Zenbones .

• Its dynamic randombones selector is intentionally not a Runyte theme.
• nordbones-dark-soft is Runyte’s own variant: nordbones-dark with text lowered from 10.6:1 to 7:1 contrast. Its background, accents, and selections are unchanged.
• These themes keep their upstream Visual and Search selection backgrounds.

Mode colours in most other built-in themes are blue Normal, red Insert, neon green Replace, orange Select, and purple Command. The Command and Replace colours are Runyte’s own rather than taken from an upstream palette.

Selections in most of Runyte’s original themes pair a cool secondary selection with a warm primary one.

Directories are usually dark blue in the built-in light themes and a lighter palette blue in the dark ones.