Base16 Framework

Base16 is not a theme itself, but a framework for building themes styled after the Tomorrow theme. It uses a standardized base of sixteen colors to ensure consistency across different applications.

To use the framework, you follow specific guidelines for:

• Styling syntax: How to map colors to code elements.
• Building schemes and templates: How to structure the color data and the application-specific templates that consume them.

A Base16 builder is an application that compiles a YAML scheme file and a template file to produce a theme file for a specific application.

The Workflow:

1. The builder accepts scheme data in YAML format via stdin (Standard Input).
2. The builder uses this data to populate variables within a template file (typically using the Mustache templating language).
3. The resulting application theme is sent to stdout (Standard Output).
4. Any errors encountered during the process are sent to stderr (Standard Error).

cat scheme.yaml | base16-builder --template template.mustache > output-theme.ext

Base16 is designed to be simple and scoped. When building or using themes, keep the following constraints in mind:

• Fixed Palette: It uses a 16-color palette consisting of 8 shades and 8 accents.
• Uniformity: All themes produced via the framework are identical in structure, differing only in their color variations.
• Coupled Colors: You cannot change the color of a single element in isolation without affecting other elements that share that color mapping.
• Simple Builders: Builders are specialized tools designed for a single task (generating themes from schemes and templates).

Template config files are used by templates to pass information to a Builder. These files must be named config.yaml and reside within a templates folder.

Each top-level key in the YAML file corresponds to a template file (e.g., a key named default refers to templates/default.mustache). For each template, you define:

• extension: The file extension for the produced file (e.g., .file-extension). The resulting filename will follow the pattern base16-[template-name]-[scheme-name].[extension].
• output: The directory name within the templates root where the processed files will be saved.

default: 
    extension: .file-extension
    output: output-directory-name
    
additional: 
    extension: .file-extension
    output: output-directory-name

Scheme files define the color palette used by a Builder to process templates. A scheme file is a YAML structure containing metadata and 16 specific color keys ranging from base00 to base0F.

Important: Hexadecimal color values must be provided as strings and must not be preceded by a # symbol.

scheme: "Scheme Name"
author: "Scheme Author"
base00: "000000"
base01: "111111"
base02: "222222"
base03: "333333"
base04: "444444"
base05: "555555"
base06: "666666"
base07: "777777"
base08: "888888"
base09: "999999"
base0A: "aaaaaa"
base0B: "bbbbbb"
base0C: "cccccc"
base0D: "dddddd"
base0E: "eeeeee"
base0F: "ffffff"

To generate a theme file, pipe a YAML scheme file into the base16-builder command and specify the target template using the --template flag. Redirect the output to a file of your choice.

Example for generating a Vim theme from a 'tomorrow-night' scheme:

cat tomorrow-night.yaml | base16-builder --template vim.mustache > tomorrow-night.vim

Scheme files require the following keys to define the color palette and metadata:

scheme: "Scheme Name"
author: "Scheme Author"
base00: "000000"
base01: "111111"
base02: "222222"
base03: "333333"
base04: "444444"
base05: "555555"
base06: "666666"
base07: "777777"
base08: "888888"
base09: "999999"
base0A: "aaaaaa"
base0B: "bbbbbb"
base0C: "cccccc"
base0D: "dddddd"
base0E: "eeeeee"
base0F: "ffffff"