The original version 0.2 of this spec can be found at chriskempson/base16. The document is reproduced here for both convenience and archival purposes. We have made minor formatting changes to improve readability, content changes to reflect how these guidelines are applied in practice, and added an example with notes about legacy format.

Base16 Styling Guidelines

Version 0.4.2 The latest version of this spec can be obtained from tinted-theming/styling

Base16 aims to group similar language constructs with a single color. For example, floats, ints, and doubles would belong to the same color group. The colors for the default scheme were chosen to be easily separable, but scheme designers should pick whichever colors they desire, e.g. base0B (green by default) could be replaced with red. There are, however, some general guidelines below that stipulate which base0B should be used to highlight each construct when designing templates for editors.

Since describing syntax highlighting can be tricky, please see base16-vim and base16-emacs for reference. Though it should be noted that each editor will have some discrepancies due the fact that editors generally have different syntax highlighting engines.

Colors base00 to base07 are typically variations of a shade and run from darkest to lightest for dark themes. These colors are used for foreground and background, status bars, line highlighting and such. Colors base08 to base0F are typically individual colors used for types, operators, names and variables. In order to create a dark scheme, colors base00 to base07 should span from dark to light. For a light scheme, these color should span from light to dark.

Usage Guidelines

We offer guidelines for both dark and light themes:

Dark

Colors from base00 to base07 should range from dark to light.

Light

Colors from base00 to base07 should range from light to dark.

Specific Colors and Their Usages

Each color (base0X) serves a specific purpose or use case, such as background, foreground, variables, errors, etc. Here's a breakdown using the "One Dark" scheme colors:

base0X	ANSI	Terminal	Text Editor
base00	0	Black (Background)	Default Background
base01	18	(Darkest Gray)	Lighter Background (Used for status bars)
base02	19	(Dark Gray)	Selection Background
base03	8	Bright Black (Gray)	Comments, Invisibles, Line Highlighting
base04	20	(Light Gray)	Dark Foreground (Used for status bars)
base05	7	White	Default Foreground, Caret, Delimiters, Operators
base06	21	(Lighter White)	Light Foreground
base07	15	Bright White	The Lightest Foreground
base08	1 and 9	Red and Bright Red	Variables, XML Tags, Markup Link Text, Markup Lists, Diff Deleted
base09	16	(Orange)	Integers, Boolean, Constants, XML Attributes, Markup Link Url
base0A	3 and 11	Yellow and Bright Yellow	Classes, Markup Bold, Search Text Background
base0B	2 and 10	Green and Bright Green	Strings, Inherited Class, Markup Code, Diff Inserted
base0C	6 and 14	Cyan and Bright Cyan	Support, Regular Expressions, Escape Characters, Markup Quotes
base0D	4 and 12	Blue and Bright Blue	Functions, Methods, Attribute IDs, Headings
base0E	5 and 13	Magenta and Bright Magenta	Keywords, Storage, Selector, Markup Italic, Diff Changed
base0F	17	(Dark Red or Brown)	Deprecated, Opening/Closing Embedded Language Tags, e.g. `<?php ?>`

Notes:

These are just guidelines and will most often provide best results when the they are followed.
Items in parenthesis in the Terminal column do not have an identified terminal use and are a more generic color description.
Most terminals allow to set extended ANSI colors, but not all. It can't be assumed that the extended ANSI colors are set when using a tinted-theming terminal template theme.

Scheme contents

Color schemes contain more than just colors.

See https://github.com/tinted-theming/home/blob/main/builder.md#schemes for specific contents of color schemes.

YAML scheme examples

Tinted theming supports both the legacy format specified in the original spec as well as the enhanced Tinted theming spec.

For a large set of color schemes, see https://github.com/tinted-theming/schemes

Legacy ayu-dark.yaml

As described in chriskempson/base16.

name: "Ayu Dark"
slug: ayu-dark
author: "Khue Nguyen <Z5483Y@gmail.com>"
base00: "0f1419" # ---- dark
base01: "131721" # ---
base02: "272d38" # --
base03: "3e4b59" # -
base04: "bfbdb6" # +
base05: "e6e1cf" # ++
base06: "e6e1cf" # +++
base07: "f3f4f5" # ++++ light
base08: "f07178" # red
base09: "ff8f40" # orange
base0A: "ffb454" # yellow
base0B: "b8cc52" # green
base0C: "95e6cb" # cyan
base0D: "59c2ff" # blue
base0E: "d2a6ff" # purple
base0F: "e6b673" # brown

ayu-dark.yaml

See https://github.com/tinted-theming/home/blob/main/builder.md#schemes for detailed schema information.

system: "base16"
name: "Ayu Dark"
author: "Khue Nguyen <Z5483Y@gmail.com>"
variant: "dark"
palette:
  base00: "#0f1419" # ---- dark
  base01: "#131721" # ---
  base02: "#272d38" # --
  base03: "#3e4b59" # -
  base04: "#bfbdb6" # +
  base05: "#e6e1cf" # ++
  base06: "#e6e1cf" # +++
  base07: "#f3f4f5" # ++++ light
  base08: "#f07178" # red
  base09: "#ff8f40" # orange
  base0A: "#ffb454" # yellow
  base0B: "#b8cc52" # green
  base0C: "#95e6cb" # cyan
  base0D: "#59c2ff" # blue
  base0E: "#d2a6ff" # purple
  base0F: "#e6b673" # brown

SPEC END

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