Iris
Iris is a high contrast color scheme for the Alacritty terminal emulator. This is a project that I had been considering for a long while. Not just for Alacritty but, as a general design guide. A simple, complete color palette can be a great aid in creating consistent designs.
Alacritty
Recently I started using Alacritty. Alacritty is a fast rust based terminal emulator. It is a multi platform program available on Mac, Window, Linux & BSD. Alacritty has many features that you would expect from a terminal emulator. For instance, It has the basic features like margins and scroll-back. As well as more advanced features like Vi mode, Buffer search, and multiple windows. Alacritty is a modern drop in replacement for my old emulator rxvt-unicode.
However, Alacritty doesn’t parody all of the features from rxvt-unicode. One thing I found missing was an easy way to import the colors used by .Xdefaults into Alacritty. Alacritty prefers to use a toml configuration file to define colors.
Iris Creation
So I set about making my own color scheme, Iris. You might notice that I used Iris to update the theme of this blog for 2024. The buttons for the home page and galleries page are all built with the Iris palette.
Iris is a high contrast dark color scheme with mauve accents. I started with one color an electric purple #8650d3. Then I built around the central theme. You can see the influence of the root color prominently in the blues and grays.
I chose to use a dark blue color as the background. This provides contrast for the lighter foreground colors. I focused on the harmony and division between colors in this scheme. I wanted it to be legible given any situation. The black I chose to use is a rich black the with blue tint. You can find the theme on my GitHub as well as the alacrity-themes repository. I have also included a gimp palettes version of the theme and, I intend to possibly expand the theme to other applications that i use from time to time.
Contributing
If you would like to contribute you can make a fork of the repository and add your own theme file for another application. Make a pull request and I will consider merging it with the main branch at my soonest convenience.