solarized: Light and dark precision color scheme for terminal apps, editors

We developers spend as much time finding the right color scheme for our text editors and command line tools as we do using them. Normally, you find your tool of choice and then browse the gallery of themes to pick one to use or customize.

Ethan Schoonover has taken a different approach with Solarized, a theme that comes with support for a number of tools out of the box including:

• Vim
• Mutt e-mail client
• Xresources / Xdefaults
• iTerm2
• OS X Terminal.app
• Adobe Photoshop Palette (inc. Lab values)
• Apple Color Picker Palette
• GIMP Palette

Never before has so much design gone into a color theme. Ethan supports both light and dark variations to support selective contrast and other features

There’s even a Sass implementation:

$base03:    #002b36;
$base02:    #073642;
$base01:    #586e75;
$base00:    #657b83;
$base0:     #839496;
$base1:     #93a1a1;
$base2:     #eee8d5;
$base3:     #fdf6e3;
$yellow:    #b58900;
$orange:    #cb4b16;
$red:       #d30102;
$magenta:   #d33682;
$violet:    #6c71c4;
$blue:      #268bd2;
$cyan:      #2aa198;
$green:     #859900;
@mixin rebase($rebase03,$rebase02,$rebase01,$rebase00,$rebase0,$rebase1,$rebase2,$rebase3) 
{
    background-color:$rebase03;
    color:$rebase0;
    * { color:$rebase0; }
    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { color:$rebase1; border-color: $rebase0; }
    a, a:active, a:visited { color: $rebase1; }
}
@mixin accentize($accent) {
    a, a:active, a:visited, code.url { color: $accent; }
    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {color:$accent}
}
/* light is default mode, so pair with general html definition */
html, .light { @include rebase($base3,$base2,$base1,$base0,$base00,$base01,$base02,$base03)}
.dark  { @include rebase($base03,$base02,$base01,$base00,$base0,$base1,$base2,$base3)}
html * {
    color-profile: sRGB;
    rendering-intent: auto;
}

We didn’t see TextMate support. Perhaps you could fork the project and contribute.

[Source on GitHub]