Please consider a default light theme

[grahamc]

Hi Ghostty folks,

I know this has been discussed some, like in #2363, but I wanted to make an explicit thread about it.

I love Ghostty's "zero config" philosophy. I also really enjoy Ghostty's default (dark) theme.

Today a colleague suggested I make my terminal auto-switch to light mode, which is something I definitely want to do. I ended up trying the (frankly VERY cool) ghostty +list-themes, but as an adherent to the "don't configure your tools if you don't have to" philosophy, I don't really see hundreds of themes as a plus.

I've now spent a lot of time looking at themes, and wishing Ghostty had a default light theme, just like it has a default dark theme.

Please, Ghostty folks: save me from myself. Put me out of my self-inflicted theme-selection misery. Make a default theme for light mode. I wouldn't mind adding a bit of config to indicate I want it to switch :).

[peterjc]

Even better, on macOS follow the system default for light/dark/auto (which can change based on lighting levels, but I've not used that myself).

[Bjorn-Eric-Abr]

yes! I does not have to be on by default if we don' find a theme that we like?

[edrozenberg]

Catppuccin has both light and dark themes if it's of interest (catppuccin-latte.conf is the light theme, the rest are dark).

https://github.com/catppuccin/ghostty/blob/main/themes

[mitchellh]

Hi Graham! I'm supportive of this, but I want to find a light theme I really like and can see myself using. To date, I haven't done this yet. The default dark theme is the dark theme I've used for my terminals for almost a decade. 😄 (I didn't make it, though I think I did slightly modify it at some point)

I need to peruse light theme candidates to see how I feel about it.

[alienman5k]

For any weird reason good light themes are hard to find. I am old school so one of the few light themes I can really use is Solarized Light or some of its variants (like Selenized).

[seanh]

Red/green colorblind user: 👍 To carefully selecting a really great default light theme. I can't use the default dark theme with the monitor that I have in my office: I get way too much reflection on the screen, and using a light theme is the best way to deal with this (better than e.g. closing the blinds and working in the dark, or turning up the monitor brightness and getting eye strain, or spending money rolling the dice on a better monitor). I would love to not have to go through the dozens of themes in ghostty +list-themes trying to find a good light one.

Having had to do that though, and based on an admittedly somewhat brief test of every currently shipping light theme, I vote for Alabaster.

Builtin Tango Light as suggested by @grahamc above was also one of the few that worked well in my brief test.

I strongly prefer for someone with good taste to just make the decision on my behalf. :)

Me too.

IMO, Alabaster looks nice and seems to have generally very good contrast. Also does not use pure white as the background color, which I think may be slightly easier on the eyes.

I tested all the themes with Vim's default theme (with set background=light) looking at a Python file and looking for contrast issues. For example many of the themes result in function names being highlighted in a color that has too-low contrast against the background color. Another common issue is highlighted search results looking bad, or the highlighted current cursor position looking bad, especially often when the cursor is on top of a highlighted search result. There are even a couple of "colorblind" or "high contrast" themes in there, and they have terrible contrast issues.

Alabaster has none of these issues.

Alabaster also seems to work well with fish shell's default theme. Many of the other light themes will show severe constrast issues almost immediately as soon as fish starts doing anything with syntax highlighting.

[matklad]

Strong +1 to making Alabaster be Ghostty Default Style Light for now. While the first-best solution would be to craft a perfect light theme just for Ghostty, blessing a good enough one is the second-best solution, and we can always change default theme later once, when we arrive at the perfect theme.

Right now,

λ ghostty +list-themes | wc -l
     430

is a big negative for me, as it goes against ghostty appeal of just working out of the box with little configuration. I with ghostty shipped reasonable theme = dark:Ghostty Default Style Dark,light:Ghostty Default Style Light and maybe 8-ish great built-in themes to choose from, being more opinionated about what makes a good theme, and leaving the rest to community.

[IGassmann]

Might be just me, but the light green color on its background is pretty flashy and jarring on the Alabaster theme. It's actually a problem with most light themes.

[pluiedev]

Right now, [...] is a big negative for me, as it goes against ghostty appeal of just working out of the box with little configuration.

A zero-config philosophy does not necessarily conflict with having many options available to users. You can tweak nearly every single config entry and we would allow that.

I with ghostty shipped reasonable theme = dark:Ghostty Default Style Dark,light:Ghostty Default Style Light and maybe 8-ish great built-in themes to choose from, being more opinionated about what makes a good theme, and leaving the rest to community.

What we could do is to designate certain popular themes that most people might be familiar with, like Catppuccin, OneDark, Dracula, etc. but we don't exactly control the source where these themes come from (which would be https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes). I would argue having a wider pool of themes to pick from is better than making the user download and manage themes themselves.