Zenburn selection background low contrast

[goldfita]

Theme(s)

doom-zenburn

What were you expecting?

The selected item background contrast is too low. This is similar to issues:

https://github.com/doomemacs/themes/issues/652 https://github.com/doomemacs/themes/issues/669

What actually happened?

Here is what you see in find file (or execute command) with doom-zenburn:

Here it is with zenburn (note that at least there is an underline):

Here it is with no theme:

The color that it displays when you mouse-over also varies for each theme.

Here is what you see for completion with doom-zenburn:

Completion with zenburn:

Completion with no theme:

I can barely make out the highlight region at all (it's over the second option). I'm guessing the colors are identical as with find-file, but it is probably more visible in find file due to the surrounding colors. Also, notice that there is no border with completions and the background color is identical, so completions looks like it's part of the main buffer. In a Java file, the completion region is a different shade.

Finally, maybe a different issue, but when you reload the theme, some faces get messed up. Reload doom-zenburn and then find-file:

The border is gone, and it again looks like find file is in the elisp buffer. While trying to find a theme, I noticed the column numbers ended up a different color from the rest of the buffer and the fringe I set with posframe ended up a different color. I don't know how to reproduce. It's probably due to something not being properly reset.

I've seen some screenshots and videos where the theme was clearly a dark mode, but the highlight color was bright, or at least not a shade of grey. Most of the dark modes I've tried seem to have this issue with the selection being almost the same as the background. It may be due to Ivy; I don't know at this point.

I've switched to dark+ and customized my foreground and background colors. It's a little better. The selection color background is a blueish color. There's still no way to distinguish the completions from the rest of the buffer.

Steps to reproduce

Install Ivy and Doom Themes. Switch to doom-zenburn. Open a file or invoke completion in elisp mode.

I'm not using the latest commit, but if necessary I could test again. I'm also not sure if Ivy is relevant or not. I also modified the minibuffer with posframe, but this doesn't change the highlight color. I can provide the code if necessary.

Operating system

Windows 10

Emacs version

Emacs 28.1

Installed commit of doom-themes

Melpa Stable 2.3.0

[goldfita]

I forgot about the ui-control in dap. This is with dark+, but it's similar with zenburn.

Doom-dark+:

No theme:

Load doom-dark+ after loading ui-controls.:

[goldfita]

Here's doom-zenburn tabs:

No theme tabs:

[goldfita]

Also, I noticed in doom-dark+, I get the an error about invalid face :background nil due to centaur tabs. See this discussion. Specifically, it's centaur-tabs-unselected-modified that has unspecified background. The problem doesn't exist with doom-zenburn.

[goldfita]

Here is what the completion looks like in doom-dark+/corfu with my slightly modified background color. Having a thin border is better than no visual clue there is a child window, but images I've seen with a slightly different shade child window look better in my opinion.

[goldfita]

The ediff faces are too muted for me in doom-dark+. I commented out all the ediff lines in doom-themes-base.el. The default ediff faces are too intense. But if I have to choose between the two, I would choose too intense because at least I can see them! Is there any way to disable overwriting the default faces?