Why everything I touch is Solarized

July 11, 2026

Terminal, editor, tmux, prompt, SSH sessions into five different machines. Same sixteen colors every time: Solarized Dark. This site's palette above is the same hex values, pulled from the same source. Not a rut, one module.

Ethan Schoonover built Solarized against actual color science rather than a screenshot someone liked. The eight monotone and eight accent colors are tuned in CIELAB space so contrast holds up consistently across both a light and a dark variant, instead of the muddy or blown-out swaps most palettes produce when you try to run them both ways. It reads as a spec, not a vibe.

The personal reason is simpler: it's calming, and it cuts visual noise. One palette everywhere means my eyes stop re-adjusting every time I context-switch between tools.

The engineering reason is why it stuck. The palette lives in one place, a Nix module, exposed as a single attrset every tool config reads from: terminal, editor, tmux, prompt, even the CSS variables behind this page. Switching theme, if I ever did, is a one-line import change in one file, not a dozen configs edited by hand and drifting out of sync a month later. The consistency isn't upkeep, it's structural.

More about how I work: home.