Development has moved to: https://codeberg.org/excalamus/amburn-theme.el

A high contrast amber theme for Emacs.

People talk about how "old" Emacs looks. I say ignore the agists and embrace the legacy. The future of Emacs glows as brightly now as the phosphor screens of yore.

Disable whatever themes you have enabled using disable-theme.

Then call,

(load "/path/to/amburn-theme.el")
(load-theme 'amburn t)

The retro VT220 font Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf is included with amburn-theme.el for extra fun.

Put the font file in ~/.local/share/fonts/, creating any directories that don't exist.

Enable the font using:

;; Height values in 1/10pt, so 100 will give you 10pt, etc.
(set-face-attribute 'default nil
                    :font "Glass TTY VT220"
                    :height 150)

Amburn is built using three colors:

• amburn-fgl (foreground light)
• amburn-fgd (foreground dark)
• amburn-bg (background)

The default colors come from here: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/12837

First, all faces in Emacs are set to "fgd-on-bg".

Next, faces are set in bulk according to package. Use the following variables to set the color for a package:

• amburn-bulk-fgl-on-bg
• amburn-bulk-fgd-on-bg
• amburn-bulk-bg-on-fgd
• amburn-bulk-bg-on-fgl

The variable should hold a list of cons cells where the car is the filename and the cdr is the package namespace. For example, the following sets fgd-on-bg for the font-lock package which has filename "font-lock.el" and namespace "font-lock-":

(setq amburn-bulk-fgd-on-bg
      '(
        (font-lock . "font-lock-")
        ))

Finally, individual faces are set using one of:

• amburn-individual-fgl-on-bg
• amburn-individual-fgd-on-bg
• amburn-individual-bg-on-fgl
• amburn-individual-bg-on-fgd

Each of these is a list of faces to color accordingly. For example,

(setq amburn-individual-bg-on-fgl
      '(
        error
        secondary-selection
        success
        warning
        ))