Solarized is a popular theme, but does it really work for Scrivener? What with default text in light mode being hard-coded black, and Scrivener’s emphasis on background accenting (labels, style markup), I couldn’t achieve low-contrast main text yet have colourful, easily distinguished, readable background accents with the out-of-the-box Solarized theme.
Here’s my take on an “inside-out” Solarized theme for Scrivener. I use the medium grays, usually used for text, as my backgrounds. Dark mode text is the familiar cream of the Solarized light background; light mode text is of course Scrivener’s default black. The result is that I’m very close to the contrast Solarized is intended to present both in light and in dark modes. As a bonus, using the Solarized background colours as label and style backgrounds results in clear, readable text in both modes as well.
I’m including a Solarized palette (Solarized.clr) for the Apple colour picker. (When in the Colour picker, click on the gear icon and choose Import…) Not only does the palette have the usual Solarized 16-colour palette, I’ve included dark and light versions of the 8 accent colours as well.
Usage suggestions:
For backgrounds behind text, use the regular Solarized accent colours (Yellow, Red, etc.) to get proper contrast. This includes label colours used as backgrounds, backgrounds for styles, and backgrounds for comments.
For use in links, use the dark colour (Red01, etc.) for the Light theme, and the light colour (Red1, etc.) for the Dark theme.
For use in inline annotations, use either the dark (Red01) or light (Red1) colour variations, according to what works best for you, but using the base colour (Red) will remove almost all contrast with the background, and make your annotations hard to read.
I really like this theme! But, clicking on the link goes to a broken Dropbox link (file not available). Is this theme not available anymore? I can’t find it on google either. Thanks.
Thank you my friend! But, I tried opening your Ayu.stheme file, but WinRAR fails to open it and says it’s an unknown format. I’m on a Windows 10 PC. I know this theme is for the Mac version of Scrivener 3, but what I want to do is copy some of the color settings from your theme to my own theme files for Scrivener 3 for Windows RC version. How do I open the .stheme zip file on a Windows 10 PC? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
EDIT: I tried just opening the Ayu.stheme file directly in Notepad++, but I got a bunch of random characters for the data elements in the XML structure within the file, like the following. What does that mean? This is what I’m seeing:
That’s not going to be feasible to do without a Mac (and then of course you might as well just use the front end in Scrivener), and even then, you’d probably need to be a developer, to some degree, to do anything useful with the data. For the sake of curiosity, the base64 decodes to a binary serialised object (which itself contains a paired Color and ColorSpace object). As with most object serialisations, they are pretty useless without the program that seralised them or the development environment at the least if it was produced from a common library object.
Thanks. I am technically savvy, and I do have development experience. But, I think I’ll err on the side of caution and stick with only editing Windows Scrivener theme files.
Are these the only handful of colors used in the whole theme? What UI elements are ayu-mirage-2, ayu-mirage, and fondo referring to? Thanks.
If you have any luck with this please let me know! I’ve been playing about with some of the customization options in Scrivener to try and replicate a few of these themes for the Windows V3 RC version but haven’t has much luck (being colour blind probably doesn’t help!).
Is there some problem with RC8 where it won’t load any themes? Windows themes show “*.sctheme” for theme loading, and whenever I try to load it, regardless of theme (if it is not bundled), the theme says “Scrivener failed loading a theme. Cannot find the theme configuration file.”
I have tried 15 different themes and this occurs on each of them.