By pure coincidence, it's six years agotomorrow that Ifinally, after years of running Emacs with a brightwhite background, moved to using a dark theme. It took a little bit ofgetting used to but eventually I got very comfortable with it, and sincethen have run everything I can in a dark mode too.On occasion, in the last year or so, I've had this urge to move to somethingdarker. Also, in part, it's an urge to change things up a little. I felt itwas time for a refresh of how my Emacs looks. I've tried a few themes, butnone have ever stuck. When trying them I've run into various issues:It just didn't look nice at allToo many other things I use in Emacs didn't get themedIt looked like there was going to be too much work to do to really theme things wellIt caused Emacs to crash1However, yesterday evening, after making an effort to simplify my modeline, I was determined to find adarker theme that I would be happy with. I think I finally managed!I've settled on modus-vivendi from modusthemes. Out of the box it feltright, and from what I can see in the documentation there's an amazingamount of customisation you can do. The key point there too is thedocumentation; there's so much of it, it's incredibly comprehensive.For example: the default choice for the mode line is to have an unsubtleborder around it -- presumably to create a good contrast. I found that fartoo distracting and was wondering what I could do about it. I didn't have towonder long, the documentation addresses exactly thatsituation.Another downside I ran into is that the colours that were showing in themode line, when I switched to mood-line yesterday, were gone. I spent ashort amount of time last night, and a good hour or so this morning, tryingto wrangle mood-line into something I liked, but I just couldn't getanything sensible going. Eventually I cracked, fired upAntigravity, prompted it with:I am using mood-line for my mode line -- seeinit.d/packages.d/melpa/mood-line.el andhttps://github.com/emacsmirror/mood-lineI am using https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes as my themeI would like to have finer control over the parts of the mode line I'veconfigured. For example, I'd like the buffer name to stand out in aninformative colour, but one that is part of the modus theme's colourscheme.Don't make changes yet, but help me understand how I should do this in amaintainable way.and then spent about 20 minutes going back and forth, refining what Iwanted; this got me aresultI'm happy with from a visual point of view. I still need to fully review thecode and the approach it took, but it isn't too far removed from what I'dbeen trying myself.Overall I'm pleased with the result, and this is the longest I've stuck witha new theme (at this point I'm probably about 4 or 5 hours into working init). I think that says something significant. I can see myself still wantingto tweak some aspects of it though. For example, the left-hand fringedoesn't feel quite right, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. While Iwant it to stand out from the main editing area, it feels... disconnected insome way. Also the background colour of the mode line still feels like itdoesn't quite blend how I'd like.Now to see if this lasts...Seriously, just the once, but that happened. I took that as a signfrom the Lisp gods that I was doing something sinful. ↩