🌙 Midnight

A modern black neovim theme written in Lua, with a strong focus on maintaining a comfortable level of color contrast for a pleasant visual experience while coding.

Showcase

More screenshots can be found in the showcase folder, if you want to know what you'll be getting from this theme.

Vision

As a lover of dark themes and all things black, I searched far and wide for black background colorschemes when I first started using neovim. Although I have used many well-crafted themes so far, it would always come down to choosing between one of these two: healthy color contrast and focused semantic clarity. It is quite difficult to nail the balance between both, especially when working with black backgrounds. Focusing too much on the former would result in a tame and uniform looking theme, whereas too much emphasis on the latter would cause the screen content to have sharp changes in color straining the eyes. I created this colorscheme to find the perfect balance between both, to provide focus and clarity while ensuring a healthy contrast level.

midnight.nvim leans towards mostly using shades of gray, followed by blue-green shades for a cooler UI color experience, while using warmer colors only for syntax and status. Most colors have sufficiently low saturation so they do not stand out against the jet black background to avoid eye strain when working for a longer duration (particularly beneficial in low-light conditions).

NOTE: This plugin is a WIP. There are still a few color choices that I am not satisfied with and will be changed in the future. Other than these select few, most colors are stable and the theme's appearance will not change as a whole.

Features

• Support for treesitter and LSP syntax groups for multiple filetypes
• Appropriate color contrast between content and UI to reduce eye strain while maintaining focus
• Darker shades of gray for non-critical UI elements such as separators to reduce distraction
• Consistent usage of the palette across plugins and neovim builtins to provide a unified IDE-like appearance
• Warmer colors for language syntax groups to attract attention intuitively in dense code files

Integrations

The following plugins have fully customized highlight groups -

• diffview.nvim
• gitsigns.nvim
• lazy.nvim
• mason.nvim
• neorg
• nvim-cmp
• nvim-dap-ui
• nvim-lspconfig
• nvim-notify
• nvim-tree.lua
• telescope.nvim
• todo-comments.nvim
• vim-illuminate

Installation

Install the colorscheme using the package manager that you love!

lazy.nvim

-- LazySpec (plugin specification)
-- return {
{ 'dasupradyumna/midnight.nvim', lazy = false, priority = 1000 }
-- `lazy` and `priority` are only needed if this is your primary colorscheme to load it first
-- }

packer.nvim

-- inside setup function
-- packer.startup(function(use)
use { 'dasupradyumna/midnight.nvim' }
-- end)

Requirements

midnight.nvim is a GUI-only colorscheme. It requires GUI client or a modern terminal version of neovim installed in a true-color supported terminal emulator.

Neovim version should be newer than 0.8.0.

Usage

Add the following code snippet to load the colorscheme.

-- Lua
vim.cmd.colorscheme 'midnight'

" VimScript
colorscheme midnight

Configuration

Configuration can be skipped if the user does not wish to change any of the default higlight groups. The plugin runs setup automatically when it is loaded using the colorscheme command.

For now, users can directly add overriding higlight groups as arguments to the setup() method. Better options will be added in the future to make the colorscheme customization simpler.

require('midnight').setup {
    HighlightGroup = {
        fg = ForegroundColor, -- :h guifg
        bg = BackgroundColor, -- :h guibg
        sp = SpecialColor, -- :h guisp
        style = RenderStyle, -- :h attr-list
        -- OR
        link = TargetHiglightGroup -- :h :hi-link (link to "TargetHiglightGroup")
        -- OR
        clear = true -- :h :hi-clear (clear "HighlightGroup"; `false` ignores this option)
    },
    ...
}

The evaluation priority of options within a highlight specification (like above) is:

1. When clear = true is specified, all other attributes are ignored
2. When a link group name is specified, all attributes except clear are ignored
3. Highlight specification using fg, bg, sp and style is evaluated only if above attributes are not specified

Color Palette

Although quite limited in variety, midnight.nvim color palette can be used from palette.lua, if the user so wishes.

local colors = require('midnight.colors')
local p = colors.palette -- raw color palette
local c = colors.components -- component color palette

Contributing

I encourage fellow contributors to submit PRs if they wish to fix a bug or add a plugin.
Since I cannot feasibly test out every single possibility, I would love it if contributors can help in improving the documentation especially for other package managers.
I would also like help with LSP and treesitter groups for languages that have not been covered.

Since this is my first plugin, all suggestions and advice from the more experienced are welcome.

Thanks

This colorscheme's design was inspired by nyoom-engineering's oxocarbon.nvim and highlighting logic was inspired by folke's tokyonight.nvim.

License

midnight.nvim is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

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