
Tomorrow Theme - pstadler
https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme
======
olliesaunders
If HN believes creative thinking is a waste of time I’ll get downvoted for
this but I fancy just letting my imagination go wild so here goes...

Video gamers can supposedly differentiate between tones more similar to one
another than non-gamers. Perhaps, if you made a theme of very similar colors,
you could achieve the same benefit from programming. Although I suspect it
might not work because the difference in the colors has to have significance
for your brain to really start paying attention to it. So you could have a
color-sensitive language. Or maybe color could be the only significant thing,
then you could just bind each character to a color in your text editor and use
a normal language.

While walking in the wood today and looking at the detail on the ground and
searching for ripe fruit in the trees I was thinking about how our brains are
really good at picking out specific visual things from noise and how more
complex visual things are sometimes easier to recognize than simpler things.
Also its possible to get really good at picking out subtle clues from very
complex input: think about a native American Indian’s ability to track moving
animals over long distances.

So I think what would be really cool is to have a way of representing each
function of a program as a visual form, ideally a 3-dimensional one. You could
then look at these form and over time you would start to be able to see
certain things about the function just by looking at the forms. I wonder if
that might be a much faster way of searching for specific things within a
large body of code such as you might do in a security audit than actually
reading through all the code because it taps into the innate concurrency of
the right-hemisphere.

There would be some difficulty would be in generating appropriate visual
forms. The form has to be meaningful. The ideal would be if it were meaningful
to the point where somebody well used to them could write the code a form
represented just by looking at the form or, at least, infer the gist of it. Of
course you don’t have to limit yourself to one form per function, you could
have 10 different forms per function, each representing different properties,
or forms generated from by dividing the code in lots of different ways (not
just functions). Or maybe you could simplify everything I’m saying here and
just have a lot more statistical static analysis of code then displayed with
charts and infographics.

~~~
wgrover
You might find graphical programming languages like LabVIEW interesting;
here's a little tutorial that shows what LabVIEW programs look like:

[http://www.ee.buffalo.edu/faculty/paololiu/edtech/roaldi/tut...](http://www.ee.buffalo.edu/faculty/paololiu/edtech/roaldi/tutorials/labview.htm)

"Wires" that carry values are color-coded according to their contents
(integers are blue, floating point values are orange, booleans are green,
etc.). Loops like FOR and WHILE are actual "loops" that encircle the repeated
code. The flow of information along the wires determines the order of
execution for the code, and you can debug your code by turning on a special
mode that actually shows the information moving down the wires.

~~~
thirdhaf
LabView IS fun, I've written a couple of drivers and a (physical device)
testing GUI with it. As I've been thinking about it more I see two hurdles to
overcome with LabView though: \- Layout: Spaghetti code becomes a very
tangible issue if you don't follow guides on routing religiously. Intro
courses only touch on this and LabView code in the wild are rarely clean.
These visual routing guides are ORTHOGONAL to good code design practices which
you also have to follow to make maintainable and understandable code. \-
Navigation: There is no VIM or Emacs for LabView code as far as I know.
Navigating a codebase and following function references deeper and deeper down
the rabbit hole becomes tedious pretty quickly. Visual breakpoints help here
but there's no substitute for quick navigation, I never found a Ctags
equivalent for this language.

(Caveat, EE turned software engineer ranting)

~~~
spartango
I'm not a LabView fan for various reasons, but something neat they've added as
of V8.0 (I think) is an auto-format tool which will take a mess of wires and
organize it. Vastly improves readability, and works really well.

~~~
thirdhaf
Hmm, we were still running 6.1 in 2008 which probably explains a lot. (No
upgrade path allowed at that time)

~~~
positr0n
Wow 6.1 is ancient... :-) LabVIEW 8.6 is a huge leap forward in usability,
stability, and performance. If you can upgrade to 2011 that's even better.

-National Instruments employee

~~~
thirdhaf
6.1 was running on an even more ancient PC from 2001. This was at a former
employer so I have no influence over this system any more. The funny thing was
that we had ample budget for this project, I think we spent about $10k on a
very nice rack-mount SCXI DAQ and about $60k on other equipment but upgrading
the computer system driving the whole thing was out of the question due to
color-of-money issues and dysfunctional inter-departmental politics.

------
AceJohnny2
I like the themeing trend towards dark backgrounds and pastel colors.

I've been using Zenburn [1] for a couple years now, and I've really grown used
to its unsaturated colors. 'Tomorrow' looks way too colorful for my taste,
kinda like eating something too sweet after weaning yourself off sugar :)

My problem with Zenburn is that, unlike Tomorrow or Solarized, it doesn't have
a good curated list of themes for various systems. I've had to hunt and peck
for themes for Emacs, Konsole, Awesome, Chromium, Thunderbird, QT, GTK, and at
this point would be challenged to provide a source and method for each...

[1] <http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburnpage/>

~~~
catenate
> 'Tomorrow' looks way too colorful for my taste, kinda like eating something
> too sweet after weaning yourself off sugar :)

Sing with me:

    
    
      What can make boring code
      Seem all fresh and new
      Cover it in pastels
      of both deep and light hue?
    
      Color highlighting
      Color highlighting can
      Color highlighting can parse every line and check that the syntax is good

------
prophetjohn
JavaScript in ST2 looks gorgeous in Tomorrow Night 80s. Java, not so much.
Keywords, class names and annotations all being the same color makes for _a
lot_ of lavender.

<http://i.imgur.com/8wRBN.png>

~~~
ag3mo
Yeah java's not so great in ST2 with Tomorrow Night but it's much better in
eclipse. <http://i.imgur.com/1HNco.png>

------
postfuturist
Vim users should go here: <http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com> if they
haven't before, that's where I found darkburn, a darker variant of zenburn
that I've been happy with for a couple years.

~~~
pydave
Vivify [ <http://bytefluent.com/vivify/> ] is another good one that takes the
opposite approach: Show you code snippets from different languages at once and
switch the colorscheme. You can also quickly scrub through the schemes and
edit them to create your own.

------
pstadler
I originally used "Tomorrow Theme - Solarized was yesterday" as a title for
this post. However, I agree with the crowd that this title was a little bit to
agressive (some might call it marketing).

I never liked Solarized, for me this is a replacement for the awesome Twilight
theme.

------
xiaomai
For people using vundle:

    
    
        Bundle 'chriskempson/tomorrow-theme', {'rtp': 'vim/'}

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you for that, I was looking for the line too.

------
singingwolfboy
Nice... but how is this "better" than Solarized? I already have Solarized
installed and set up the way I want. Why should I switch away?

~~~
chao-
With something so preference-based, one is hard-pressed to argue better or
worse without agreeing on the standards of evaluation. Put another way: I
don't think discussing it in binary terms of "better" or not will do much
good.

If you like Solarized, or it's good enough and not worth the trouble to switch
away, simply don't.

Solarized wore on me after a while. I switched back to Monokai for Sublime
Text but found that it was too bright for my taste when used in a terminal. I
have since rolled my own subdued/pastel variant of Monokai's candy-bright
colors in a few places.

This looks close enough to what I had that it will provide the feel I want,
without me having to do much more work to port it to different environments or
application configurations.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Personally, I don't like "rainbow themes". Too many dissonant colors add more
cognitive load than meaning.

I recommend this one: <http://hcalves.deviantart.com/#/d2x1yjo>

------
Johngibb
For Visual Studio users, check out <http://studiostyl.es/> (no affiliation)

~~~
martinwnet
Yes, the Son of Obsidian theme (<http://studiostyl.es/schemes/son-of-
obsidian>) is so much better than this theme (for ASP.NET projects anyway).

------
dumbluck
I really wanted to like this, but I think that colors preferences are both
subjective and born of habit/experience which leads to wiring our brains to
expect certain colors for certain things, because I don't like pastels, and I
don't like red as a non-alert color.

It's a good idea, with a lot of thought put into it. The author should keep
trying. Maybe there is more than one right option.

Personally, I think the best way to do this is by a "hot or not" site for
fonts and colors. Have a page for each language with "hot or not" of random
fonts and color combinations until the stats show which combinations certain
groups like. Tie in other surveys as well and give away gift certificates to
Amazon each month as a prize for over 100 votes that aren't outliers.

~~~
ChrisKempson
Will certainly keep trying. I would say there is no right option and at the
same time all options are right.

There does seem something common about themes that appeal to many people but
ultimately each has their own correct version of how things should be. Hence
my next project <https://github.com/chriskempson/base16> Interesting idea by
the way!

------
oemera
I use this theme since I ever saw it in every editor or alike I use (Zsh,
Xcode, Vim, Sublime Text 2) and I'm really happy with it! The colors IMO are
more distinguishable than on solarized but this seems to be a matter of taste.
Just try it out if you are looking for a new theme.

BTW: as many mentioned it is awesome that the theme is available for so many
editors!

Edit: Should have mentioned that I use always that Tomorrow Night Eighties
theme

~~~
Xymak1y
Do you know where to get this theme for Sublime Text?

~~~
joelhooks
TextMate themes work with Sublime directly.

------
vito
As a CLI designer (silly as that sounds) it's nice to see a theme that doesn't
abuse the 'bright' palette. Hated Solarized for that alone.

~~~
lysol
I'm honestly intrigued -- what type of software do you work on?

~~~
vito
I work on the CLI for a PaaS. So lots of interaction, detailed output for your
apps and their status, etc. Probably a less interesting answer than you hoped.

I started adding colors to highlight important parts of the output (e.g. app
names, status, ...), but received a bunch of complaints from people who
couldn't read parts of the output. Turned out they were just using bad/broken
themes, like Solarized, which abuses the bright palette by replacing them with
various unreadable shades of blue.

It's otherwise a pretty nice color scheme. Just annoying that I can't trust
the "bright" palette to ever be readable because of themes like it.

(Also, the themes that come with Terminal.app are pretty abysmal. The stock
'blue' isn't even readable in some common configurations.)

------
Sandy_Klausner
Speaking of using color as a formal syntax in a graphical programming
language. The example found at
[http://www.coretalk.net/CubiconPrivate/CubiconPaper/MemoryMa...](http://www.coretalk.net/CubiconPrivate/CubiconPaper/MemoryManager.zip)
(User: Cubist1 and Password: Sandy2) is the executable design of the Memory
Manager module for a next-generation virtual machine (VM). The visual
directory on the left of the screen is a number of control-flow methods,
interleaved with white and gray backgrounds. The colored icons express
fundamental language constructs, in this case, memory pointer transfer,
comparisons, and the like. This set of methods compiles into 37 KBytes of ANSI
C.

------
qwertzlcoatl
Doesn't seem to have the technical justifications of Ethan Shoonover's
solarized [ <http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized> ] but looks pretty well
thought out to me.

------
reissbaker
I really, really like this. I've been a fan of Twilight/ir-black style themes
for a while, but could never find one with the perfect ratio of contrast to
visual noise -- especially for console Vims. Now I have.

------
ideamonk
Monokai is popular choice for many initially, it looks good but hurts eyes.
Solarized on the other hand seems to lack contrasts at times.

After spending a great amount of time in 'Merbivore Soft', then 'Made of Code'
last year, I've fallen in love with 'Tomorrow' - ST2 & XCode. Mostly for the
vibrant colors and pleasant contrast. Clojure too looks very nice in this.

Coal Graal is another nice theme - <http://goo.gl/fH9rP> <http://goo.gl/4nCHk>

------
pstadler
For Terminal.app I still prefer Optometrist:
<https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist>

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the mentioned theme.

------
brunolazzaro
I've used Monokai since the realease of ST. Then i switched to Solarized light
but it wore me down really fast on long hours, i tried Solarized dark but to
no avail (the blue is just too much). I then saw a reailcasts video and
thought it was worth a shot. Then i moved to zenburn (wich i still use at the
terminal and vim) but switched to Espresso Soda on ST2. I just swtiched to
Tomorrow since it looks more coupled in terms of a swatch.

------
jh3
Thanks for posting this theme. Here's what I've been doing for quite some time
now:

\- Terminal: ir_black, monaco 11 pt.

\- Vim (console): ir_black, monaco 11 pt.

\- MacVim: molokai, inconsolata, 14 pt.

I've been using emacs lately, though, where I've been using the twilight theme
because zenburn wasn't working for me from the marmalade repo.

This theme is going everywhere. I really like the chalkboard/pastel color
combo and have settled on this for now since it nice on my eyes.

------
phn
I like this theme, and used it for a while but I find myself going back for
monokai.

A little off-topic: What do HN people prefer, light or dark themes?

~~~
LukeHoersten
Light unless I'm in a completely dark room and feel like my eyes are being
radiated.

~~~
phn
I always feel that way when I try a light theme, but I wonder if it is a
matter of habit. For example, when I work with eclipse for a long time, I tend
to forget that I'm using a light theme.

------
nshankar
Thanks for the theme. Changed Zenburn with Tomorrow-Night-Bright and feels
very good. Zenburn was not able to show visual selections in a proper color.
Also, non printable characters were showing very bright. Problems solved with
Tomorrow theme.

------
jkubicek
I've been trying to use solarized off and on for a while now, but the text
highlight just doesn't have enough contrast for me. Any highlighted text is
unreadable. Tomorrow Night looks like it doesn't have this problem. Awesome!

------
SquareWheel
When I used Notepad++ my favorite theme was Waher[1]. I've since switched to
Sublime Text 2 but do miss it, Monokai just isn't doing it for me.

[1] <http://waher.net/archives/1013>

------
jenius
I have been using this theme for years and I absolutely love it. I'm surprised
it got upvoted so much on HN since it's not new at all, but by all means I
would upvote this 1000 more times if I could. Amazing theme

------
Groxx
Wow, that's a nice one. Very readable, not too pastel... I almost never use
the more 'stylish' themes because I find their tradeoffs a pain, but this
might be an improvement on anything I've used thus far.

------
mnicole
So I'm not sure if I'm slow or what, but I'm not getting any of the Tomorrow
or Base16 Textmate themes to import into Aptana. Imported a few other
.tmThemes and they work fine. Any ideas?

------
dudus
Finally someone built a theme better than Vim's desert. Bravo.

~~~
ChrisKempson
That's quite a compliment, thanks :)

------
Derbasti
Awesome! Having a color theme available for most/all tools I use is amazingly
useful! I have been looking for such an alternative to Solarized for a while!

------
DigitalSea
This is awesome, however I use Sublime Text Editor 2 of which there is no
theme for and thus serves no purposes just yet.

~~~
swang
1\. Create a folder with the Theme name in the Packages folder of Sublime Text
(goto Preferences | Browse Packages)

2\. Drag Textmate themes into the new folder

3\. Goto Preferences | Color Scheme and they should be there!

------
d0m
Pretty nice theme. I've been using wombat for a couple years so I'm happy to
give this one a try.

------
mmackh
Judging by the screenshots, this does not include a replacement/substitute for
Solarized Light.

~~~
finalcut
I installed it for Sublime and the plain "Tomorrow" is like Solarized Light..
where as tomorrow night - xx are a collection of darker themes.

~~~
bmj
Yes, though the light theme doesn't exist yet for all editors (Visual Studio,
in my case).

~~~
ChrisKempson
Just added <https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme/pull/117>

~~~
bmj
Thanks!

------
chrismealy
I love solarized dark at night, but I like this a little better for the
daytime. Well done.

------
clownz0r
I've been using Tomorrow Night for a while now and I think it's my favorite
dark theme.

------
stevejb
Is there anyone working on Emacs 24 deftheme support? If not, I can try to
work on it.

------
solox3
I've never seen Solarized, so Tomorrow it is. Looking forward to Kate support.

~~~
rplnt
Kate's editor (I guess at least, it was in KDevelop which uses Kate as an
editor as far as I know) has a great functionality - different colors for
different variables. I only worked on one project in KDevelop but I really
liked this functionality and missed it in other editors.

------
chadhietala
Been using Tomorrow Eighties for the past 6 months or so. I like it a lot.

------
swamy_g
Oh Rubymine where are you? Nobody wants to support you.

~~~
smoovej
Rubymine is a JetBrains editor. Can also be used in PHPStorm etc.

[https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-
theme/tree/master/J...](https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-
theme/tree/master/Jetbrains)

PS - thanks so much for this. Outstanding theme.

------
Derbasti
What other curated multi-program themes are out there?

~~~
aeflash
Solarized is perhaps the most well known.

<http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized>

Monokai also has wide support in a lot of editors.

------
Jgrubb
Sass code is beautiful in this theme. thank you!

------
noirman
It's great. Thank you for releasing this.

------
joshskidmore0
I love this theme!

------
bjc
anyone know the font used in the example images?

------
tkahn6
Personally I love jellybeans.vim

It works great in a 256 color console and in a GUI.

<https://github.com/nanotech/jellybeans.vim>

~~~
dnos
jellybeans is my favorite color scheme ever. There is a Visual Studio theme
for it here:

<http://studiostyl.es/schemes/jellybeans>

------
crag
STILL missing a Netbeans theme.

~~~
mbell
I've never understood netbeans, why use it over intelliJ? (Honest question)

~~~
crag
For PHP - I love PHPStorm (from jetBrains - the same company behind IntellJ).

But it's missing one important (to me) feature that's been labeled as a
critical bug for 2 12 years. And never fixed:

And that's <http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-2377>

"No autocompletion for php variables inside [SQL] strings"

Believe it our not, I still write SQL statements in my code. So writing an
UPDATE on a table with 30 fields (I didn't design the tables) is hella easier
in Netbeans then PHPStorm. I don't have to worry about typo's in Netbeans.

If JetBrains ever gets around to fixing this, I'll gladly switch.

~~~
mbell
I had no idea netbeans even supported php.

------
zschallz
Disappointed that it took me about 5 minutes to figure out why this was so
important to HN. Neither the title or the link gives much information about
what this is or why it is so great.

Maybe I'm just dumb.

