kantan is a simple way to make consistent 16-colour schemes for all your programs. At its core is a tiny shell script for templating arbitrary configuration files.

It comes with templates for:

• vim
• Xresources (xterm et al.)
• iTerm 2
• st
• Terminator
• Console
• PuTTY
• Your pull request welcome!

kantan respects the ANSI colour codes, making it work with any console program by default. This makes it perfect for users who run many colourful programs that would otherwise need to be reconfigured.

kantan depends on only bash and awk. This means that you don't have to install ruby or python on a newly provisioned machine just to build your colour schemes – kantan works out of the box.

kantan is inspired by base16-builder and derives some structure from it.

Default Scheme

kantan comes with a modified version of base16's default scheme, modified to conform to ANSI.

Palette (there's a template for this image, palette.svg):

xterm on ArchLinux:

vim in iTerm 2 on OS X:

Usage

To build all templates with the scheme schemes/default:

$ ./kantan

To build all templates with a custom scheme:

$ ./kantan /path/to/scheme/file

If you use a git repository for your configuration dotfiles (highly recommended), integrating kantan is extremely easy. Just add kantan as a submodule, and modify your Makefile to tell kantan to build its templates. For an example, you can take a look at my own dotfiles repository. Otherwise, you can just run kantan directly and copy/link the files it generates.

Scheme format

Schemes are just shell scripts that define the hex[n] variables. Take a look at the default scheme for an example. Note that although this is a 16-colour scheme, there is one extra colour to use as a background colour, which is at hex[16].

Templating

Templates are extremely simple. Just insert ${var} anywhere in the template to have it replaced with the desired colour code. var can be one of:

• hex[0-16] - hex representation
• rgb_r[0-16], rgb_g[0-16], rgb_b[0-16] - RGB red green and blue decimal values (0-255), respectively
• srgb_r[0-16], srgb_g[0-16], srgb_b[0-16] - sRGB red green and blue floating point decimal values (0.0-1.0), respectively
• Any other environment variable that you set

So if colour 3 had hex value 123456 and you wanted something=#123456 you could do something=#${hex[3]} (note the leading #).