Monokai for Emacs is a port of the popular TextMate theme Monokai by Wimer Hazenberg. The inspiration for the theme came from Bozhidar Batsov and his Zenburn port and Sublime Text 2 which defaults to this color scheme.

I like the colors and I like Emacs. This followed.

The theme uses built-in theming support available Emacs 24 and later.

I recommend using Prelude in conjunction with this theme. Bozhidar Batsov has done some awesome work in making Emacs beautiful and accessible to a newcomer.

I've been using the theme with spacemacs and have really enjoyed it.

Download monokai-theme.el to the directory ~/.emacs.d/themes/. Add this to your .emacs:

(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes/")

Now you can load the theme with: M-x load-theme RET monokai

Monokai is available in both Marmalade and MELPA. Keep in mind the fact the version in the Marmalade repo may not always be up-to-date.

You can install monokai with: M-x package-install monokai-theme

To load it automatically on Emacs startup add this to your init file:

(load-theme 'monokai t)

Add the theme to dotspacemacs-themes in your .spacemacs file:

(defun dotspacemacs/init ()
  (setq-default
    dotspacemacs-themes '(monokai)))

Please see full list of variables in the defcustom section.

You can override specific core colors using this in your init.el or equivalent file:

(setq ;; foreground and background
      monokai-foreground     "#ABB2BF"
      monokai-background     "#282C34"
      ;; highlights and comments
      monokai-comments       "#F8F8F0"
      monokai-emphasis       "#282C34"
      monokai-highlight      "#FFB269"
      monokai-highlight-alt  "#66D9EF"
      monokai-highlight-line "#1B1D1E"
      monokai-line-number    "#F8F8F0"
      ;; colours
      monokai-blue           "#61AFEF"
      monokai-cyan           "#56B6C2"
      monokai-green          "#98C379"
      monokai-gray           "#3E4451"
      monokai-violet         "#C678DD"
      monokai-red            "#E06C75"
      monokai-orange         "#D19A66"
      monokai-yellow         "#E5C07B")

If you would like to change the font size of your org-mode headers you can do so with:

(setq monokai-height-minus-1 0.8
      monokai-height-plus-1 1.1
      monokai-height-plus-2 1.15
      monokai-height-plus-3 1.2
      monokai-height-plus-4 1.3)

If you would like to use variable-pitch-mode you can enable it with:

(setq monokai-user-variable-pitch t)

This used to be enabled by default but broke the principle of least surprise which resulted in a couple of issues. See #62 & #56

If your're experiencing font issues using org-mode on Windows with emacs 25 try add this to your init.el or equivalent file:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook '(lambda () (load-theme 'monokai t)))

(when (and sys/win32p (> emacs-major-version 24))
  (add-hook 'window-setup-hook '(lambda () (load-theme 'monokai t))))

For more info check the thread in #56

Please, report any problems that you find on the projects integrated issue tracker. If you've added some improvements and you want them included upstream please send a pull request.

Thank you, Kelvin