monokai_nl

> Here’s another test. Close your eyes (not yet! Finish this sentence first) and try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names? Can you?

Yeah. Pink for keywords, orange for arguments, yellow for strings, green for functions, blue for classes and purple for constants.

But it’s not even important if you can. Having different colors helps you quickly / unconsciously filter through different parts of your code. I agree it can be too distracting to have lots of colors (especially with semantic highlighting, which I’m no particular fan of for that reason), but a carefully calibrated theme helps most people I think.

I can also certainly imagine that some brains just work differently. Maybe for some people colors just add more noise?

Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.

Couple of things.

The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.

I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.

Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).

I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.

And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.

I'm considering Adyen and Mollie, but presently lacking the time to properly investigate and redo my payment flows. It will happen at some point.

Yeah I named the color palette after my own alias 20 years ago, that was not the smartest move perhaps, but hey here we are.

To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM. At that point I was more than happy though. And I like to support my fellow Dutch startups too.

Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/

My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.)

The article states "A website isn't art". This product mindset fundamentally makes the web a boring place. I would personally welcome all websites that are art.

The special thing is that it’s decentralized. I know this discussion will not resolve and I’m not a blockchain zealot. I do think it’s an elegant decentralized storage system for algorithmic art where you make outputs definitive and collectible after initiating a run.

You’re conflating AI art with algorithmic art. This is the reason why I wrote the article.

A generative system can produce an infinity of outputs. An art platform combined with a blockchain allows you to store a finite number of outputs from the same system definitively without knowing upfront what the outputs would look like. This forces you to think carefully about your system: it should produce interesting works with each iteration. Some people call this long form generative art.

Regarding Monokai, I’ve written some history about it here: https://monokai.pro/history :)

Generative systems often produce random outputs every time it runs. When run in a browser, an output just vanishes after a refresh and is usually never found again if you haven't saved the PRNG seed.

Using a blockchain, you can store a specific output of your generative system in a way that's definitive and collaboratively agreed upon. If you believe in collecting / trading digital assets, that's a prerequisite for algorithmic systems.

I really like generative art. It's part intellectual ingenuity, part aesthetics.

I've only realized later that it had a name, but since I've had my hands on a computer, I've been making generative graphics with code one way or another. First in GWBasic, later in Flash, and more recently in JavaScript.

In my view generate art is art created by an autonomous system. The trick is to balance randomness with intent and to create clever algorithms with maximum visual impact. Nowadays the term "generative" is more associated with AI, and to differentiate it from AI Art, I call it Algorithmic Art now. I wrote a piece about it: https://monokai.com/articles/algorithmic-art-as-a-subset-of-...

And I know NFT's are frowned upon here, but I've always found Algorithmic Art a perfect match for NFT's. Where before I created autonomous systems that ephemerally generated different outputs each run, now you can store specific outputs on the blockchain by just storing the PRNG seed. There are platforms that facilitate this, like Artblocks or Fxhash.

Agree. If you want some colors, git status, a few convenience functions and a clean prompt, this is my current setup: https://monokai.pro/zsh

I program with syntax highlighting.

I'm not convinced by the arguments of the article:

- actively clicking on matching parentheses has the benefit of selecting that part

- being more sensitive to the "beauty" of the code

I think syntax highlighting doesn't get in the way of these two points.

The only valid point:

- No syntax highlighting automatically supports all languages

True I guess. In the sense that no shoes support all feet.

Thank you for making this tool. I'm calling it in a custom webpack plugin so it transforms GLSL code into a single minified string on every build / watch event. I used this setup for my latest artwork: https://monokai.com/work/origin

Working on the Monokai Pro website for my color theme for code editors, and the Monokai Pro plugin for JetBrains, which has just been released. Working out some optimizations, which will be pushed in the next update.

Monokai Pro has been running for more than 5 years now for VSCode and Sublime Text, and the original Monokai almost 20 years.

https://monokai.pro

Photography and algorithmic art are exactly my thing. In the past few years, I’ve been deeply exploring generative art, though I prefer calling it "Algorithmic Art" since "generative" is often linked to AI now.

Some of my works can even be drawn with a pen plotter.

Take a look: https://monokai.com

That's untrue. I've created https://monokai.pro, to my knowledge the first commercial theme. It's been going strong for years now.

People are willing to pay for nice things. Especially if it takes longer to create it yourself.

A theme is more than a list of colors. Monokai Pro contains custom designed icons and color filters too, and some code logic to sync it all up. It needs continued updates, as editors keep evolving with new UX/UI elements.

This is the one app I use every day. I practically live in it. Most editors are slower and more visually cluttered, or pack so much functionality that I often get lost. Sublime strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. Probably Emacs or Vim are even more expressive, but I've never bothered to learn those, Sublime just packs enough power for me. The LSP plugins are a good addition to give Sublime the same code completion / AI functionality of other editors.

Re: keeping up-to-date: color themes depend on underlying syntax definitions. Every now and then these are updated and break the colors in subtle ways. Aslo, custom icon requests for files / languages, editors that update and provide new theme entry points to be colorized. These are the most common points to keep up to date.

Re: People fixing the theme: I don't disclose the source so that won't work I guess.

The original Monokai was created in 2006, and I created Monokai Pro in 2017 to be more balanced, include a custom icon set and color filters. Here's more information about the history of Monokai: https://monokai.pro/history

I don't think I'll share the details in the future, but it's an experiment for sure. I've seen success by selling one-off licenses of Monokai Pro for Sublime Text and VSCode, where I used the same mechanism: everything is free to use, except you get a pop-up message every now and then. People that want to get rid of the popup or offer support can then opt to pay for a license.

I understand it's uncommon practice to ask a fee for a set of colors. The reality is that making a theme and keeping it up to date is not trivial. A color theme, custom icon graphics and IDE config, along with code to glue it all together when you switch filters does take some time to make. And the codebase is different for each editor (Sublime: Python, VSCode: JavaScript, Jetbrains: Kotlin). I think it's not unfair to ask for a small fee for this work.

The common theme was created by me. I've tried my best to make a polished theme for Jetbrains so that all colors in the IDE and the syntax highlighting harmonize better.

Thanks! I thought about unlocking color filters for subscribers, but opted for making everything available for free, and just showing a popup asking for a license every now and then.