240; 12022 H.E.

I like having my computers and tools tailor-made to suit my tastes and wants. It makes me feel at home. When I see my favorite collection of colors, contrasts, and schemas, it feels right. It might not be the best approach for your productivity, as you would spend the first couple of hours to a couple of days fine-tuning whatever you have in front of you to your liking. Yet, I believe there is value in bending anything and everything to feel at home.

In the past, I made a config files repository, where I stored all my cool Linux dotfiles, mutt stuff, custom shell scripts for acme, and more... This is all in the past now. I was still in high school. Then, I made a new repository, which I conveniently named dotfiles to replace config-files. What a novel idea! However, I quickly fall out of the habit of manually updating the configs or using special programs that take a list of target files and hard symlink before pushing updates. Why not write them out on a page on my website with pictures and all the cool stuff?

THiS iS ExcItINg. First of all, I have to start with my colors and preferences for the terminal. I like darker backgrounds and brighter foregrounds. But not too bright. White on black is one sure way to strain your eyes with a one-way ticket. All the cool hackers like the “green-on-black,” which I think looks incredibly tacky and hardly legible. Unless you convince yourself otherwise. Many developers I was never too fond of always used this matrix color scheme.

I’m sorry, it doesn’t make you look cool or feel like it. I know it because I have also had it as my terminal for years. It is something you need to grow out of. I like the classy “orange-on-black” balance, which gives off nice Portal - Still Alive vibes. Here are my preferred colors: #ffd000 for foreground, #000000 for background, #a466a5 for selection, and #f4f4f4 for selected text. As a sheltered macOS user, I use iTerm2. In Todd Howard’s fashion, “It just works.”

Portal is a great game.

Oh, and yeah. Forgot about the fonts. I always use Monaco for Sans-serif monospace fonts when coding and such. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t think of including the bold variant with their default systems, so there is this patch, which will get you the Monaco font with a bold-variant.

Emacs is next. Oh, emacs. How long have we been together? I think it is around the fifth or sixth year now. The longest relationship I have had with any software. Emacs’s been there through thick and thin. In my lonely nights as a college student, stressful afternoons at work, and lovely mornings of focus. We have shared a sacred bond – a mutual config file that we have already been maintaining for many years. Here is to our friendship, camaraderie, and fruitful partnership.

With a preface like that, the way emacs feels and looks is meaningful to me. Very much so. Spending hours looking at a screen should bring you joy and the kind that lasts for years. For the looks, I primarily depend on the fantastic Andre Richter’s emacs-lush-theme, which in turn is inspired by JD Huntington’s blackboard theme. I have some custom faces added in for LSP integrations and such. Of course, I cannot miss the fantastic work done by nano-emacs, who brings the elegance of modern UIs to emacs. I forked my version of it a long time ago, which I’ve been happily using for years.

IntelliJ is one of those things that I refuse to believe exist because it makes me concerned whether they are tapping directly into my brain when I’m writing some of that sweet Java. Phenomenal IDE with state-of-the-art debugger, freaky code completion, and much more. I only found one fatal flaw with the software – it didn’t have a theme I liked. They do have a plugin, which puts an anime girl in the bottom right of the screen with accompanying color schemes. It’s kinda cool.

But that is not what I’m looking for. Creating themes for IntelliJ is too hard. What I did instead is I found a theme I liked on its principles – Lotus Dark from Lotus Theme. Later, I adapted lush-theme from emacs using color schemes and called it najimi-jetbrains. Now, I feel safe once again.

The color scheme is currently meant for Java codebases. I might add other languages if I feel like it one morning.

I love pink, purple, and all the adjacent colors. So for my macOS colors, I use their stock purple, which nicely affects everything else in the system. Otherwise, I prefer darker themes with candy-like secondary colors to balance everything.

All right, bye! 😘 ◼︎