Emacs color theming is an epic failure. There are too many modes that define their own colors, and the colors are not defined in any semantic way: they are simply colors that the author of the mode likes. That means that if you switch to a color theme like Solarized (or anything), some mode is going to have fucked up and unusable colors.<p>Most of the time, things appear to work because everyone writes their font-lock modes in terms of meaningful colors, like "font-lock-builtin-face", but as soon as you venture outside of what font-lock provides, you're fucked if the color theme author doesn't use the modes you do. And since pretty much everyone uses different modes, color themes simply do not work. (I usually define my colors in terms of the font-lock faces to make sure that color themes work. But sometimes you have more information than a normal font-lock mode does, and then you have to manually select a new color. Hashes and arrays in cperl-mode are a specific example.)<p>I also have some specific complaints about how the mode is written. Why is the color theme definer burdened with quasiquoting and color classes when a macro could make it possible to sanely extend the color theme without extra work? Something like:<p><pre><code> (define-color-theme solarized
:base-colors-for light
foo "#abcdef"
bar "#fedcba"
baz "#coffee"
:mode-colors-for light
background foo
font-lock-builtin-face bar
...)
</code></pre>
As it stands, there is too much boilerplate and I would never be motivated enough to type everything needed to get the modes I use to work.<p>Also, while I'm whining, why do people name their own fucked-up Emacs config things like "Emacs Prelude" instead of "my .emacs"? I agree that many of Emacs' defaults are stupid, but the solution is education, not a random .emacs that invalidates the Emacs documentation. When you change all the defaults, you'd better provide a new user manual, or people are just going to be confused.<p>Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I got my wisdom teeth out yesterday and the painkillers are not doing much for me. :)