Color palettes

[uncenter]

Would like to revisit #200, but I can't comment on it to get it reopened so I'll just copy it here.

The default themes don't use hex codes, but rather colors like "red" and "lightyellow". It would make it a lot easier for people to make their own simple color palette themes, keeping the choice of blue for this component or whatever, but allowing them to use their own shades of that color.

[palette]
red = "#80AEFA"
green = "#CD9EFC"
white = "#FFA577"

https://starship.rs/ has this kind of thing, e.g. https://github.com/catppuccin/starship/blob/e99ba6b210c0739af2a18094024ca0bdf4bb3225/starship.toml#L23-L133. They support arbitrary color names too, which should ideally be the case here as well.

[sxyazi]

What is its behavior under light and dark modes respectively? Specifically, can users use different color palettes for light and dark modes? If so, how can this be supported? If not, why?

[uncenter]

In the theme.toml light/dark could be supported by:

[palette.light]
red = "#80AEFA"
green = "#CD9EFC"
white = "#FFA577"

[palette.dark]
...

Or/in addition to that a palette could be used in flavor.toml (just the palette, nothing else) and then put under flavor.dark or flavor.light in the theme.toml like how flavors are used.

[sxyazi]

I probably won't support it. Recently, I experimented with creating a color scheme-agnostic color palette based on yazi-rs/flavors, aiming to abstract common colors, but the results weren't great.

Specifically, Yazi uses 16 abstract colors to cover the entire theme, but there are issues:

• For themes with a small number of colors, like Solarized (16 colors) or Dracula (11 colors), they don't map one-to-one with Yazi's 16 colors. To achieve good contrast that fits Yazi's color palette, I'd have to "invent" some transitional colors that don't actually exist (this and this).
• For themes with a large number of colors, like Tokyonight (33 colors) or Catppuccin (36 colors), it's hard to represent them properly within Yazi's 16-color limit, which prevents them from fully showcasing their unique characteristics, since there's structural differences in Tokyonight and Catppuccin.

Because of this, introducing a color palette may not be truly meaningful compared to the effort and complexity it would add. So unless I see strong, convincing evidence that justifies it ¹, this is unlikely to happen.

Footnotes

1. For example, a simple replacement script based on theme.toml that swaps red, blue, etc., with the hex colors of any given theme to see how well it actually works ↩

[uncenter]

I think you misunderstand. With the proposed color palettes theme feature, an arbitrary number of colors in the palette can be defined. There is no restriction to Yazi's 16 colors. I'd suggest looking again at the Starship palette configuration example I linked originally.

• Catppuccin (36 colors)

26 for each flavor actually :)

[sxyazi]

an arbitrary number of colors in the palette can be defined. There is no restriction to Yazi's 16 colors

Yazi's preset theme only uses ANSI colors (blue, red, etc.), if you define a custom color like mycolor, how do you expect Yazi to use it?

26 for each flavor actually :)

Indeed, not sure why I typed 36 :-/

[uncenter]

Yazi's preset theme only uses ANSI colors (blue, red, etc.), if you define a custom color like mycolor, how do you expect Yazi to use it?

Again, read how Starship's palette system works. We would do basically the exact same thing here.

[uncenter]

Specifically https://starship.rs/config/#example gives a good reference. Maybe something like this for Yazi:

palette = "catppuccin_mocha"

[manager]
cwd = { fg = "${mauve}" }

[palettes.catppuccin_mocha]
rosewater = "#f5e0dc"
flamingo = "#f2cdcd"
pink = "#f5c2e7"
mauve = "#cba6f7"
red = "#f38ba8"
maroon = "#eba0ac"
peach = "#fab387"
yellow = "#f9e2af"
green = "#a6e3a1"
teal = "#94e2d5"
sky = "#89dceb"
sapphire = "#74c7ec"
blue = "#89b4fa"
lavender = "#b4befe"
text = "#cdd6f4"
subtext1 = "#bac2de"
subtext0 = "#a6adc8"
overlay2 = "#9399b2"
overlay1 = "#7f849c"
overlay0 = "#6c7086"
surface2 = "#585b70"
surface1 = "#45475a"
surface0 = "#313244"
base = "#1e1e2e"
mantle = "#181825"
crust = "#11111b"

Someone could use this flavor, but then say - hmm, actually I want to use blue for the CWD:

# theme.toml

flavor = "catppuccin_mocha"

[manager]
cwd = { fg = "${blue}" }

Using the catppuccin_mocha flavor would inherit the palettes.catppuccin_mocha that the catppuccin_mocha flavor defines/uses.

Ideally the ${<color>} syntax could be avoided, but since as you mention Yazi already treats strings like "red" as CSS colors that would not work well.

[sxyazi]

OK, I think I get what you mean now.

You want to introduce a new color system parallel to the existing one, where the colors in the color palette don't directly correspond to the existing ANSI colors (red, blue, etc.), but instead function as an independent system, like ${blue}. To me, this feels like an unnecessary complication, and I'm not interested in it, sorry.

Closing as not planned