The bespoke-themes's intro from akirak

Bespoke-themes is a set of custom, medium contrast, light and dark themes for Emacs (intended for GUI, though basic support in terminal has been added), along with an optional custom modeline. This started as a fork of Nicolas Rougier’s work on elegant-emacs and nano-emacs, but has evolved with some ideas and colors borrowed from material colors, solarized and nord, as well as color design aided by coolers.co and the classic Werner’s Nomenclature.

The theme is notably less conservative/minimal than nano- or elegant-emacs, in the sense that it has a broader color palette and sets fewer configuration conditions on fonts and ui elements, but bespoke-themes otherwise shares many of its basic themeing ideas with the good work done by Rougier (see also his work on on the design of text editors).

The theme sets six core colors, plus five highlight/accent colors, and colors for foreground, background, modeline, and highlight. The light and dark variants aim to be as consistent as possible in their use of colors, and to set a decent compromise between aesthetics and readability:

Faces are fairly comprehensive, including (optional) evil cursor colors. I’m trying to add faces on a regular basis. If there is a face you’d like to see added please open an issue.

NOTE: It is still early days for this theme, so there may be significant and/or breaking changes made from one commit to the next. I also may continue to tweak colors slightly to find the best balance between aesthetics and readability. Suggestions and pull requests are welcome!

Breaking Changes:

I’ll try and log all breaking changes, including renaming functions and variables here:

6/13: Normalized all modeline variable names from bespoke...modeline to bespoke...mode-line for consistency (commit: e119c0a)
6/12: Renamed bespoke-set-mode-line-height to bespoke-set-mode-line-size (commit: a46b7b5)

Options

There is an optional custom modeline, which may be set as a header line (similar to nano-emacs), or as the normal footer line, or the theme can make merely cosmetic changes to the modeline. See the options for the (bespoke-set-mode-line) variable.
- You can set the size of the mode line with (bespoke-set-mode-line-size)
- Toggle between the header or footer mode line with (bespoke/toggle-mode-line) or disable the custom modeline altogether with (bespoke/disable-custom-mode-line)
- Set the buffer status symbol in the modeline. This is configurable separately for GUI and terminal. Default symbols are, respectively, read-only: (⨂)/(RO), modified: (⨀)/(**), and read-write: (◯)/(RW).
- Show git diff in modeline with (bespoke-set-git-diff-mode-line)
- Substitute any symbol for the major mode by setting (bespoke-set-mode-line-cleaner) to ‘t’ (see also the variable (bespoke-mode-line-cleaner-alist)
There is a useful footer line visual alert “bell” inspired by DOOM emacs. To use include (setq bespoke-set-visual-bell t) in your setup of the theme.
You can set italics for keywords or comments (or both).
You can set variable-pitch for headlines using (bespoke-set-variable-pitch).
There is a toggle function for toggling between light and dark theme variants: (bespoke/toggle-theme). You can also call each theme variant directly with (bespoke/light-theme) or (bespoke/dark-theme).
All options are available via customize-group, and can also be found in the bespoke-themes.el file.

Settings

Here’s one possible way of setting up the theme. Note that since this theme is currently not on Melpa the use-package setup below utilizes straight to install packages, but you can of course install it from this repo however you wish.

(use-package bespoke-themes
  :straight (:host github :repo "mclear-tools/bespoke-themes" :branch "main")
  :config
  ;; Set header line
  (setq bespoke-set-mode-line 'header)
  ;; Set mode line height
  (setq bespoke-set-mode-line-size 3)
  ;; Show diff lines in modeline
  (setq bespoke-set-git-diff-mode-line t)
  ;; Set mode-line cleaner
  (setq bespoke-set-mode-line-cleaner t)
  ;; Set evil cursor colors
  (setq bespoke-set-evil-cursors t)
  ;; Use mode line visual bell
  (setq bespoke-set-visual-bell t)
  ;; Set use of italics
  (setq bespoke-set-italic-comments t
        bespoke-set-italic-keywords t)
  ;; Set variable pitch
  (setq bespoke-set-variable-pitch t)
  ;; Set initial theme variant
  (setq bespoke-set-theme 'dark)
  ;; Load theme
  (load-theme 'bespoke t))

To get windows to divide in a more attractive manner use the following setting:

;; Vertical window divider
(use-package frame
  :straight (:type built-in)
  :custom
  (window-divider-default-right-width 12)
  (window-divider-default-bottom-width 1)
  (window-divider-default-places 'right-only)
  (window-divider-mode t))
;; Make sure new frames use window-divider
(add-hook 'before-make-frame-hook 'window-divider-mode)

For the padding in frame used in the screenshots try the following settings:

;; Make a clean & minimalist frame
(use-package frame
  :straight (:type built-in)
  :config
  (setq-default default-frame-alist
                (append (list
                '(font . "SF Mono:style=medium:size=15") ;; NOTE: substitute whatever font you prefer here
                '(internal-border-width . 20)
                '(left-fringe    . 0)
                '(right-fringe   . 0)
                '(tool-bar-lines . 0)
                '(menu-bar-lines . 0)
                '(vertical-scroll-bars . nil))))
  (setq-default window-resize-pixelwise t)
  (setq-default frame-resize-pixelwise t)

To get a splash screen see Rougier’s splash.el. You can see my customization of it here.

For dimming non-active windows try dimmer.el

;; Dim inactive windows
(use-package dimmer
  :straight (:host github :repo "gonewest818/dimmer.el")
  :hook (after-init . dimmer-mode)
  :config
  (setq dimmer-fraction 0.5)
  (setq dimmer-adjustment-mode :foreground)
  (setq dimmer-use-colorspace :rgb)
  (setq dimmer-watch-frame-focus-events nil)
  (dimmer-configure-which-key)
  (dimmer-configure-magit)
  (dimmer-configure-posframe))