Airline theme should distinguish mode by color

[ghost]

I suggest to invert the way you have assigned colors, at least in the light variant. Right now you have the center (big) section a very dark blue, and it gets lighter on the smaller outer sections. You should swap this. Same idea for tabs... Tab bar would be better gray with tabs blue. Big big blue bars at top and bottom of screen are distracting.

Additionally, please add some different color to the bar background depending on mode.

I would try myself but feel like you are the superior designer :)

[pickfire]

I would like to have color based on the mode too but it seems that the original author wanted a distractless bar. In My Humble Opinion, I think you need to wait and see what he will say.

[ghost]

Ideally only the outermost segment of the Airline would need to change color, and it could be subtle. Right now the middle solid blue bar is what is distracting.

I can implement it if author is receptive but have no terminal to test on.

[NLKNguyen]

Thanks for the suggestion :) Personally, I rarely use Airline in my workflow because it's a bit unnecessarily heavy when working on a remote machine. That's why I don't have much experience with it. I heard Lightline is more lightweight but haven't tried nor had the need for it. So, I simply made it resemble the PaperColor's default, as seen on screenshots. About the color changing on modes, I also feel it's unnecessary because we consciously know what mode we are in already. Moreover, that blinking color is kinda more distracting to me than the static bars :)

More importantly, the hard part is to work around the Airline theme code. I picked one of the Airline themes that seemed a bit easier to configure, but it still had a lot of color bindings such that I couldn't set the color of individual elements separately to the way I liked. I would design it differently if it I could freely pick the color for each element.

Please feel free to try out modifying it if you like :) You can prefix your Airline theme name with "PaperColor-", for example PaperColor-Light-Alternative or anything not conflicting with existing files, so that you can work on master branch directly if you prefer. Good luck :+1:

[pickfire]

@dawnofthedev And the PaperColor theme for lightline is developed by another developer which you can refer too.

[UncleGoogle]

Hi, I'm new in vim but maybe my feedback will bring some 'goods'.

I agree with dawnofthedev - color invertion in tabs would seem to be more natural for me. Additionaly, as I mostly use dark background, I wish see not-blue airline theme. With edkolev/tmuxline.vim it becomes a bit scary.

we consciously know what mode we are in already.

yes... but not always - e.g. when you are switching between windows/ panes. Then color helps. On the other hand I agree that uniform color is more elegant.

Taking all this into consideration now I'm looking for another airline_theme for PaperColor (now, I stopped at 'pencil' airline theme but it's not very canny). I don't want switch from PaperColor to another theme because just love this:) Many thanks for it and and good luck with further development.

[NLKNguyen]

Hi there,

Now I'm reconsidering this, and I think I can provide both types of Airline theme: 1 more uniform and 1 more vibrant like many tend to prefer. However, it is not happening soon because this theme is currently under major change to become a framework for multiple color schemes. There will be a generator to create Airline themes for different color schemes, and each can have those 2 types.

Again, it's not the top priority right now, so please check back when version 1.0 releases.

Thanks for the wish :)