🎨 Building colour schemes with mini.base16

I'm a huge fan of mini.nvim. If you're unfamiliar here's a description from the plugins readme:

Out the box it replaces 90% of the plugins I was previously using. The major benefit here is that the mini.nvim plugins are cohesive and designed to work together. Consequently I've not encountered any behaviour with conflicting plugins, i.e. overlapping keybindings, like I'd experienced in the past.

mini.base16

mini.nvim comes with a few themes minischeme, minicyan and randomhue (which you can see here) but these aren't really to my taste.

Fortunately, mini.nvim comes with: mini.base16, a plugin that allows you to generate vim colorschemes from a base16 palette. The base16 project is a popular framework for expressing colorschemes from a palette of 16 colours. Various tools exist to convert these palettes into colorschemes for different applications.

What about existing base16 vim colorschemes?

base16 already has existing colorscheme ports available in the form of chriskempson/base16-vim, various lua ports also exist for neovim. These are great if you're happy with a fairly vanilla vim/neovim setup.

The problem is these colorscheme implementations might not necessarily support certain third plugins you're using, so things might end up looking ugly or visually broken.

Using the mini.base16 plugin you can take a base16 colour palette and generate a neovim colorscheme that supports all the mini.nvim plugins + a bunch of popular third party vim/neovim plugins (a full list of supported plugins is available here).

The end result is something like this:

Building Themes

Here's an example base16 palette (for the mocha colorscheme):

scheme: "Mocha"
author: "Chris Kempson (http://chriskempson.com)"
base00: "3B3228"
base01: "534636"
base02: "645240"
base03: "7e705a"
base04: "b8afad"
base05: "d0c8c6"
base06: "e9e1dd"
base07: "f5eeeb"
base08: "cb6077"
base09: "d28b71"
base0A: "f4bc87"
base0B: "beb55b"
base0C: "7bbda4"
base0D: "8ab3b5"
base0E: "a89bb9"
base0F: "bb9584"

I can take these definitions and create a corresponding mini.base16 colorscheme:

require('mini.base16').setup({
  palette = {
    base00 = "#3B3228",
    base01 = "#534636",
    base02 = "#645240",
    base03 = "#7e705a",
    base04 = "#b8afad",
    base05 = "#d0c8c6",
    base06 = "#e9e1dd",
    base07 = "#f5eeeb",
    base08 = "#cb6077",
    base09 = "#d28b71",
    base0A = "#f4bc87",
    base0B = "#beb55b",
    base0C = "#7bbda4",
    base0D = "#8ab3b5",
    base0E = "#a89bb9",
    base0F = "#bb9584",
  },
})

vim.g.colors_name = "base16-mocha"

I found it quite painful to manually have to copy/paste these values over from a .yaml colour palette into the equivalent .lua format that mini.base16 expects. So I wrote a quick and dirty Python script to do the conversion:

from pathlib import Path

for theme in Path('.').glob("*.yaml"):
    out = theme.with_suffix('.lua')
    lines = ["require('mini.base16').setup({", '  palette = {']
    for line in theme.read_text().splitlines():
        if line.startswith('base'):
            dec, color = line.split(': ')
            lines.append(f'    {dec} = {color[:1] + "#" + color[1:]},')
    lines.append('  },')
    lines.append('})\n')
    lines.append(f'vim.g.colors_name = "{theme.stem}"')
    out.write_text("\n".join(lines))

Or you can take the existing vim base16 themes and convert these to the mini.base16 lua equivalents

from pathlib import Path

for theme in Path('colors').glob("*.vim"):
    out = theme.with_suffix('.lua')
    lines = ["require('mini.base16').setup({", '  palette = {']
    for line in theme.read_text().splitlines():
        if line.startswith('let s:gui'):
            _, dec, _, color = line.split()
            lines.append(f'    base{dec[5:]} = {color[:1] + "#" + color[1:]},')
    lines.append('  },')
    lines.append('})\n')
    lines.append(f'vim.g.colors_name = "{theme.stem}"')
    out.write_text("\n".join(lines))

🖼️ Theme showcase

Below is an example of a few mini.base16 themes in action:

You can find these converted themes from the above showcase in my Dotfiles.