Static homepage for Everforest

[iambeingtracked]

I've been thinking about everforest having a domain name like Nord or Dracula has. It would be really nice to have a website to present people how the color scheme looks. It would also help the theme gain popularity. For the domain itself i think everfo.rest or everfore.st would fit the best. There's also everforest.agency, but I think it would fit better for a fan-made website.

[sainnhe]

Sounds interesting, but I'm not a web developer so I can't create a beautiful website currently.

[iambeingtracked]

Me neither. But this can be made as a community project. It is possible to host the website's source on git(hub) and make it automatically sync with the changes in the repo. This way, someone can make a push request with their changes and if it gets merged to upstream, the website synchronizes with the repository.

[antoineco]

The Nord website is great because it contains a formal description of the color palette, with the intended usage of each color in that palette. In that regard it is made first and foremost for designers. It reminds me of the website for the Solarized color scheme.

The Everforest palette was created more empirically, so to make a web page interesting we probably first need a good formal description of how the colors work together with each contrast setting.

Also both Nord and Dracula have a lot of official ports. Everforest only has Vim and VSCode. To have some contents to show on a web page, we would need a few solid community maintained ports. The wiki lists a few.

[iambeingtracked]

Yes, that is true. Everforest currently lacks ported themes, we can wait till more get created, Also, I think it would be nice if there was actually some kind of a standard for how colors are used, because now people just use the given colors however they want. It is good, because it allows for more creativity while still having the ability to have your own place in the wiki, but can create some unfortunate moments with porting. I think we'll need to wait.

[kmkinney]

I have some experience with web design and have loved the Everforest theme. I use it for everything! If at some point this becomes a thing I'd love to help.

[sainnhe]

I want to share some my ideas on "community" and "official".

When I first created gruvbox-material I thought about creating a github organization to maintain it, so it will become more maintainable and can gain more attention.

I shared my idea with another maintainer of gruvbox-material, but he refused, he said he prefer a more open approach to development, like gruvbox.

There is no official organization of gruvbox, thus no such things like "official ports", everything but morhetz/gruvbox is third-party. And there is a place to gather information of some ports of gruvbox for other apps: morhetz/gruvbox-contrib, if one wants to share his port, he can fork this repository and open a PR.

I found that I actually like this idea, it reminded me of the speech on Git by Linus Torvalds, he thought the correct way to develop open source projects should be distributed and decentralized.

So I decided to use a more open development mode:

• No organization, thus no official ports.
• If you want to port this color scheme to another app, go ahead and do it, don't worry about being "non-official".
• If you think the existing port of an app is bad, go ahead and create your own, there is no need to worry about the existing port is "official" while your port is not.
• If you want to share your port, you can directly edit the wiki page, no need to open a PR and wait for the maintainers to merge it.
• It's also fine if you don't want to add your project to the wiki page, all depend on you.
• If you think this vim color scheme needs improvement, you can open a PR, or fork this repository and maintain your own.
• You can also create a lua based color scheme for neovim if you don't like this vim script implementation.
• The only special point of this repository is that the color palette is originally designed here.

Of course this development mode has some downsides, one of which is that this repository may lose maintaince one day.

But unlike other types of open source projects, the essence of color schemes is the color palette, not the implementation. So even if this repository loses maintaince one day, the everforest color scheme itself will not lose maintaince, because the design of the color palette has already finished.

Gruvbox hasn't been updated in two years, but it's still one of the most famous color schemes out there, and nowadays people still actively create new gruvbox based projects.

And I don't think this repository will easily lose maintaince. @jef and @antoineco did a very great job and we'll do our best to keep maintaining it.

---

I understand people like this color scheme and want to contribute for it, sincere thanks for you. But I think instead of creating an organization and maintaining "official" ports, a better approach is simply sharing it to your friends, creating your own ports or opening PRs to help us improve the code.

As for the website, my original idea is not making it as a home page like Nord or Dracula, I just want a place to demonstrate the color palette, and maybe add a link of the wiki page to tell people where to find the ports. The source code may be hosted in a different branch of this repository and the website can be published via github pages. Or if you think it's inconvenient to maintain, you can also create your own repository to host the source code.

[iambeingtracked]

I fully agree.

[antoineco]

Looks like @jamesalexatkin started something earlier this year :)

https://jamesatk.in/everforest-web/

[sainnhe]

It looks beautiful!

[iambeingtracked]

Looks pretty bare, but it's still awesome

[jef]

as much as i agree with @sainnhe, i think it would be worth looking into github pages and creating a long living branch (gh-pages) that hosts a page via https://sainnhe.github.io/everforest.

just wanted to throw that one out there 😛

[jamesalexatkin]

Hey just seen this 😄 I hadn't heard that much about open source philosophy before but there is something very elegant about what you say @sainnhe!

With regard to the site I was making, I was messing around with React and trying to put something together. There is more than what renders on the link but am trying to solve an issue with BrowserRouter not working with Github Pages.

The plan though has been to host links to the current ports people have made (and keep it updated of course), as well as the palettes that make up the colour scheme.

[antoineco]

Not a static page per-se, but I started documenting the palette and usages of each color at https://github.com/antoineco/sainnhe-everforest/blob/palette/palette.md

There is a PR open at #92 to add this document to the repo (still a draft).