On the topic of Emacs themes

I missed out on watching EmacsConf as it was taking place but I'm making my way through it now.

I really enjoyed the talk that @rytswd@hachyderm.io gave about colouring Emacs and the considerations in methodology that one should take into account when making their own theme.

I really struggle at creating consistent color palettes. I just adjust the colors haphazardly until it looks "good" (and it rarely ever does).

Ryota's tips all sound great for someone wanting to take the next step in making consistently beautiful themes.

One thing he mentioned that stood out to me was that most (if not all) text editors and integrated development environments rely too heavily on colors. In my opinion, that makes the programming experience atrocious from a legibility perspective.

I personally like to disable the rainbow vomit by hacking font lock directly and this little function works like a charm:

(defun my/font-lock ()
  "Enable limited syntax highlighting for the current buffer.
Too much coloring is obnoxious and is an impediment to
readability for me. When this function is invoked, only strings
and comments will be highlighted."
  (setq-local font-lock-keywords nil)
  (turn-on-font-lock))

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'my/font-lock)
(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook #'my/font-lock)
(add-hook 'scheme-mode-hook #'my/font-lock)
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'my/font-lock)
(add-hook 'sh-mode-hook #'my/font-lock)

Still, Ryota's tips about color spaces are going to help me navigate theming more methodically which I'm certain is going to make the experience that much more enjoyable.