Ashen

Let the fire fade — not your focus.

Designed for long nights and longer thoughts.

Ashen is a warm, muted theme born from the glow of dying embers — rich in reds, orange highlights, and layers of gray. Inspired by Dark Souls III, it's crafted to be gentle on the eyes and steady on the mind. Whether you're deep in the terminal or writing code by candlelight — Ashen offers a calm, focused atmosphere for development after dark.

This monorepository contains official implementations of Ashen across a range of editors, terminals, tools, and more — each carefully tuned to carry the same muted warmth. The project is developed on sourcehut and provides a read-only mirror on GitHub. Please see Contributing to learn how to contribute to Ashen.

• Editors
• Terminals
• Tools & Interfaces
• Desktop & UI
• Theme Formats
• Contributing

Editors

Where syntax takes shape.

• Helix — the best theme for the best editor.
• Neovim — Lua plugin for modern Vim sorcerers.
• Kakoune — POSIX compliant editing, in style.

Terminals

Words against the dark — quiet, deliberate.

• Ghostty — sleek and spectral.
• Kitty — for configuration fiends seeking warm tones.
• Alacritty — no distractions, just firepower.
• Windows Terminal — Ashen for the dark side.
• WezTerm — endlessly configurable, never loud.
• foot — a dark theme for a light terminal.

Tools & Interfaces

Terminal tools softened by firelight.

• bat — like cat, but warmer.
• eza — a modern ls with subtle highlights.
• lazygit — git bathed in ember tones.
• yazi — fast, clean file browsing.
• fzf — fuzzy finding with focus.
• fish — the friendly shell made even friendlier.
• television — fuzzier fzf in gray.
• aerc — email done plainly, with muted elegance.
• zellij — terminal multiplexed with subdued grace.

Desktop & UI

Let your environment glow.

• waybar — a status bar with just enough light.
• sway — a tiled workspace in quiet tones.
• fuzzel — launch your apps with a whisper.
• zathura — focused reading for tired eyes.
• Firefox — the web, dimmed for comfort.
• Monkeytype — compose Shakespeare, Ashen style.

Theme Formats

For bringing Ashen elsewhere.

• tmTheme — classic syntax format (TextMate, Sublime, and more).
• Base16 — highly portable, no-nonsense theme specification.

Contributing

To submit bug reports and requests, please visit the ticket tracker. For any other discussions, contact the mailing list (possibly by carrier pigeon.)

I do not accept PRs on GitHub! Please consult the documentation to learn how to contribute on sourcehut. Send your patches to ~ficd/ashen-devel.

If you're porting Ashen, use the existing ports as a reference for the palette and overall feel. Treat Helix as the "ultimate" guide on the colors to be assigned to syntax elements.

As a rule of thumb: numbers and builtin literal types should be blue, strings red_glowing, keywords red_ashen, operators orange_blaze, delimiters orange_smolder, brackets g_6, and special punctuation orange_golden. red_flame should only be used for errors, and orange_golden is the preferred color for warnings. Ashen doesn't use green, so you can pick an appropriate substitute from the palette. For example, the terminal themes use orange_blaze for green, which looks good in most applications.