Properties1

Tenebrous Colour Scheme

On this page

Tenebrous started out inspired by Poimandres and has grown into something more unique.1 It is a dark colour scheme. The background is a near-black blue and the text is a soft grey-purple. Amber is the main accent, used for links and headings, and blues, purples and greens cover the rest, with red and pink used sparingly. (But it is very pretty!)2

The Tenebrous colour palette as labelled swatches with hex codes

Themes

I have two themes built from it so far, one for Obsidian, which is what I live in, and one for Zed.34

Contrast

I measured every text colour against the background (#0d0f14) with the WCAG formula, where AA needs 4.5 to 1 for normal text and AAA needs 7 to 1.56 Every text colour passes AA, including faint text at 6.30 to 1, and faint text stays above 4.5 to 1 even on the lightest surface (borders, hover and selected rows). I raised the contrast after the first version, when faint text only passed for large text.2

I did not require AAA. That much contrast is not something I need yet, and designing for it leads to many sites looking the same.6

One place for every colour

Every colour lives in palette.json, and a build script writes the Obsidian palette, the Zed theme and the palette image from it, so a colour only ever gets changed in one place.

Anthropic’s Claude did help me write the build scripts.2

Footnotes

  1. GitHub, Poimandres theme ↩

  2. GitHub, Tenebrous README ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. GitHub, Tenebrous-Obsidian ↩

  4. GitHub, Tenebrous-Zed ↩

  5. W3C, Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.3, Contrast (Minimum) ↩

  6. W3C, Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.6, Contrast (Enhanced) ↩ ↩2