Last week I came across a theme for Emacs called Ample at https://github.com/jordonbiondo/ample-theme. I loved the colors and general feel of the theme and starting using it immediately. It worked great and I really like it. The only issues I had was that rbenv.el in the modeline was an ugly red and the theme didn’t work in the terminal. So I started poking at the theme code. It is the first time I have ever opened up a theme and looked at tweaking it.

Along the way, I started looking at other themes. I kept coming back to zenburn-emacs at https://github.com/bbatsov/zenburn-emacs. I liked the way the code was organized and the little touches like automatically starting up rainbow-mode, which I had never used.

So I decided to try and combining the colors from Ample and the code from Zenburn into one theme. My result is available at https://github.com/mjwall/ample-zen. Zenburn had a bigger palette than Ample, so I added in some colors. I removed packages that I don’t use, and added some, like rbenv, that I do. For me, the modeline in the active window is important, so I tried to make that stand out. It appears to work OK running Emacs in the terminal as well.

Here is a screenshot

All the credit goes to Jordon Biondo for his colors in Ample and Bozhidar Batsov for his code in Zenburn-Emacs. Ample-Zen is currently available in Marmalade and a pull request has been merged to MELPA. Read more about installation at https://github.com/mjwall/ample-zen#installation