Re: Why has the light blue theme been made obsolete?

[Stefan Kangas]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > Is there a particular pressing need addressed by the obsoletion of the
> > light blue theme?  At some point, I found the theme quite appealing, and
> > I think there are many other people who agree.
>
> See the discussion in Bug#47047: http://debbugs.gnu.org/47047

Actually, let me go into some more detail here:

The reason for obsoleting it is that it is unmaintained and not very
complete.  With "complete", what is meant is that it has only a small
number of faces defined, which means that it produces bad results in
too many commonly used modes.  If it was maintained, someone would be
working on improving this, but this does take an interested party to
actually follow up on bug reports, add new faces as they appear in
Emacs, etc.

I made this point in the above bug report, but there is no way to
style Emacs with 25-50 face definitions.  It is very hard to put an
exact number on this, as e.g. some faces are inherited and therefore
more important, but realistically speaking you need at least twice
that to have a somewhat decent coverage.  Compare light-blue-theme.el
with manoj-dark-theme.el to see the difference I am talking about.

More generally, I think Emacs would be well served by a better curated
selection of default themes.  The already highly popular modus-themes
has been included in Emacs 28, which I think is a step forward, and I
hope they will see much use.  For Emacs 29, I intend to look around
for other themes to include.  I'm not sure there are any good ones
where copyright is not an issue, but that remains to be seen.

PS. Another idea: the note in NEWS could come with an explanation of
why it's deprecated, and that if anyone is interested in maintaining
and extending it, they should contact emacs-devel and we will consider
reversing its obsoletion.  With a bit of luck, we can get an
interested party to take action - perhaps even before the release of
Emacs 29.