forgotten

A vim theme inspired by the Oblivion keycap set by oblotzky (which was inspired by the Oblivion tmTheme by Paolo Borelli).

screenshots

forgotten-dark	forgotten-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 forgotten via vim-plug, add the following to the top of your vimrc:

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

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

activation

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

• colorscheme forgotten-light
• colorscheme forgotten-dark

Note that the background setting doesn’t affect this theme.

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

terminal vim

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

palette

forgotten 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.

• accent colour hues were selected at the scale of 1/12 (30°) colour wheel intervals
  • 6 of these hues were fine-tuned with 1/6 subinterval adjustments
• base colour hue was selected from among:
  • the 24 hues available at the scale of 1/24 (15°) colour wheel intervals
  • the additional 6 aforementioned fine-tuned hues
• discrete intervals were also used for tuning colour saturations (1/24) and values (1/12)
• 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
1d252b	eb3b3b	d45959
303940	e07426	c97b42
3f4b54	ebbf3b	d4b659
6c7175	289e31	5c8a60
8e9194	289e8a	508a80
b8bcbf	3083bf	5688ab
d7dde0	8f69b5	8b779e
f5fbff	e05e8a	c97591

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

Orange is the colour of fire, which serves as a preliminary to many practical activities. 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 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 rare purple dyes historically 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 existence as one types their names.