office

A vim theme inspired by classic office beige.

screenshots

office-dark	office-light

pictured font: Input Mono Narrow (1.2x line spacing)

setup

installation

While vim themes can be installed manually (place theme file in ~/.vim/colors/), a plugin helper is recommended.

If you don’t have a preferred helper, consider trying vim-plug, which can be installed with:

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

To install office using vim-plug, add the following to the top of your vimrc:

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
Plug 'nightsense/office'
call plug#end()

Then restart vim and run PlugUpdate (from the vim command line).

activation

To activate the office theme, add one of the following lines to your vimrc:

• colorscheme office-light
• colorscheme office-dark

To assign themes to specific intervals of the day, try the night-and-day plugin.

options

You can tweak the following options by adding lines to your `vimrc’.

Disable highlighted current line number:

let g:office_dark_CursorLineNr = 'off'
let g:office_light_CursorLineNr = 'off'

Disable the highlighted line number background:

let g:office_dark_LineNr = 'off'
let g:office_light_LineNr = 'off'

terminal vim

See the nightshell repository, which allows office to be used in a variety of terminal applications.

palette

office consists of 8 theme-distinct base colours, which are used for most interface elements, and 8 standard accent colours (common to the “nightsense theme family”) used for syntax highlighting.

• hues were selected at the scale of 1/48 (7.5°) colour wheel intervals
• saturations and values were adjusted at the scale of 1/12 and 1/24, respectively
• the ISO 3:1 contrast standard is met by nearly all text/background combinations, exceptions being made for some transient-highlighted backgrounds (e.g. cursorcolumn, cursorline)

base	light-background accents	dark-background accents
2b2b28	e04a4a	bf6060
403f3b	e07538	b5734c
6b6a62	d4ac35	ab9248
75746c	349e42	508a58
949288	289e8e	458a81
9e9c91	3f90bf	5c869e
e0dece	9969b5	876f94
fffef5	d46a85	b5697c

Red, the colour of alarm, is used for warning elements, including error messages, misspellings, and diff deletions.

Orange, the colour of fire, can be associated with the preliminary “warmup” phase of some activity; literally, this could be the heating-up of a hearth for forging, or a stove for cooking. Orange is therefore used for preliminary elements, such as preprocessor commands (which prepare data to be handled by another program), incremental searching (that is, a search term in the process of being typed), titles, and miscapitalized words.

Yellow, the classic highlighting colour, is applied to elements that are not warnings, yet should draw attention with high visibility. These highlighted elements include search results, task tags (TODO, FIXME…), and diff changes.

Green, the colour that says “go ahead, proceed with the task at hand”, is used for action elements, such as statements (if/then, while/do, case…), mode indicators (insert, visual…), vim user prompts, and diff additions.

Teal is named after the “common teal”, a kind of duck, thus connecting this colour with the concept of “species”, which is a means of classifying life into very specific types. Teal is therefore used for specifying object types, such as data type (boolean, integer, string…) or storage class (static, volatile…), as well as marking mislocalized words (that is, words that are not misspelled but of the wrong type, namely a foreign locale type).

Blue, a colour of calm stability, is used for constants, which come in the form of boolean values, integers, floating-point numbers, characters, and strings.

Purple, often associated with (historically) rare purple dyes produced for special works of art, is used for special text, including special characters (standalone or within syntax units), vim tags, and debugging statements. Rarely-used words are also marked, allowing the writer to consider whether such a specially uncommon word is appropriate.

Pink, the colour of spring blossoms, is used for object names, including the names of variables and functions. To code is to bring countless objects blossoming into life as one types their names.