**MONAD THEME** **minimalist dark and light colors for focused immersion** INTRODUCTION ============================================================== This post is rather random and unrelated to the general topic of this blog. It is sharing my attempt at design, at least in the context of terminal application themes. It shows some of my aesthetic preferences which will influence the style of the illustration throughout the book. I used a variety of color schemes for coding and writing over the years (Nord Theme was one of my favorites in the past). Eventually, I transitioned towards minimalism in all aspects. I used a minimal Arch Linux installation with DWM from suckless as my window manager. I developed most of my configuration from scratch with the goal of minimising distractions and avoiding installing unnecessary packages. One missing part was a uniform color scheme, which agrees with the minimalist raw spirit of the tools I use. Initially I tried some monotone themes such as Tao. However, monotone themes lack expressiveness in providing contextual information. I also tried some grayscale or quasi-monotone options, but those often came with opinionated stylistic choices that I found distracting. Finally, I decided to write my own themes for three of my most used software packages: vim, emacs, alacritty. I called it the Monad Theme (monad has many meanings in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science, which fit into the spirit of simplicity and purity). There are two variants of these colors shown in screenshots below. I use the light variant in the morning and the dark variant in the evening (with switching triggered from a zsh shell script). SYSTEM --------------------------------------------------------------   EMACS --------------------------------------------------------------   ALACRITTY, VIM, LF --------------------------------------------------------------   VIDEO ==============================================================