Syncing Tab Theme After Theme Load

James Dyer — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:50:00 +0100

Previously I wrote about the incompatibility of some Emacs themes with the tab-bar and my temporary fix:

The tab bar was introduced in Emacs 27.1, during which I created a function to apply some simple logic to make the tabs look moderately decent and fit in with the new theme. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was how to activate the function after a theme load, as there didn’t seem to be a hook.

Well, actually there does seem to be such a hook and it seems to have gone into Emacs 29. As with a lot of these little tweaks I found this on reddit in the emacs subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1ft3wwm/did_the_much_needed_theme_change_hook_arrive_with/

From my previous post I wrote :

Now that the defun is available, how to activate it? My first thought was to add a hook for when a theme is loaded, but there doesn’t seem to be such a feature!? I also tried advising around `load-theme`, but that didn’t go well either, it worked for themes that were not loaded, but for those that were, a change in state was not detected, and the tab theme tweak was not applied.

The solution is to simply add the following to your init file. Now that I know about this, I might even find some other use for it.

(defun my/after-theme-loaded(theme)
 (my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme))

(add-hook 'enable-theme-functions 'my/after-theme-loaded)

with the original my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme as follows:

(defun my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme ()
 "Synchronize tab-bar faces with the current theme."
 (interactive)
 (let ((default-bg (face-background 'default))
 (default-fg (face-foreground 'default))
 (inactive-fg (face-foreground 'mode-line-inactive))) ;; Fallback to mode-line-inactive
 (custom-set-faces
 `(tab-bar ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-bg :foreground ,default-fg))))
 `(tab-bar-tab ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-fg :foreground ,default-bg))))
 `(tab-bar-tab-inactive ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-bg :foreground ,inactive-fg)))))))

My tab theme fix is now activated on every theme load, and I no longer have to rely on muscle memory to make Emacs look colour-coherent when changing themes, which I do a lot!! 😀

Winner Undo to Tab Bar History

James Dyer — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 10:56:00 +0000

Now I am using the tab-bar workflow I noticed that winner-mode was not working per tab in that the winner undo would return to the previous state of another tab, pretty annoying! 😕

But there is an easy fix, replace (winner-mode 1) with (tab-bar-history-mode 1)

and for example I replaced my following keybindings:

(global-set-key (kbd "M-u") 'winner-undo)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-i") 'winner-redo)

with

(global-set-key (kbd "M-u") 'tab-bar-history-back)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-i") 'tab-bar-history-forward)

Ironically I had just been reading a related section in Mastering Emacs and this configuration was recommended to avoid confusion and general vexation.

I would also recommend increasing the number of tab bar history elements remembered, the default is 10 and I quickly found myself running out.

Therefore I put in:

(setq tab-bar-history-limit 100)

Tab-Bar on Emacs@ Dyerdwelling

Syncing Tab Theme After Theme Load

Winner Undo to Tab Bar History