meowsoot.nvim

Years of “almost”

I ran Catppuccin for most of the last couple of years. Great theme — but something always felt slightly off, and I could never quite name it. Every few months I’d wander off, try Tokyo Night, try one of the quiet low-contrast ones, live with it for a week, and then quietly crawl back to Catppuccin.

Two things nagged at me the whole time. The background was never dark enough for my taste. And — I know this is irrational — I can’t stand green in code. Strings, comments, whatever; green just reads as noise and I can’t unsee it. But I also didn’t want one of those washed-out, everything-is-grey themes. I like a pop of color and a strong contrast ratio.

Eventually I stopped hunting and built my own.

Soot sprites and a Pop-Tart cat

The palette started as two mental images.

The background is charcoal, borrowed from Studio Ghibli’s susuwatari — the little soot sprites from Spirited Away and Totoro. The pink and peach came from, of all things, Nyan Cat’s Pop-Tart body. From there I sat down with the HSL color wheel and worked out cyan, yellow, and lavender until it settled into a six-hue system that feels balanced, not random.

The one rule: no green in code

Here’s the opinionated part. In meowsoot:

• strings are yellow
• functions are pink
• types are lavender
• keywords are cyan

And green? Green only shows up where I actually want it — diff and git-add markers, success states, the terminal’s ANSI slots — and never in your actual code.

The fun bit is that this isn’t just me being disciplined. It’s enforced in the theme’s own code: the green value simply isn’t reachable from any syntax-highlighting group. If I ever slip and reach for it in the wrong place, the theme fails to load. The rule can’t rot.

-- "No green in code": green is unreachable from syntax groups, not filtered.

-- palette.lua — green exists, one per variant, reserved:
green = { 140, 35, 70 },

-- palette.lua:resolve() — resolver is blind to intent, so p.green gets a hex.

-- colors.lua — THE CHOKEPOINT: `c` is built by hand and skips the green key.
local c = {
  pink = p.pink, cyan = p.cyan, yellow = p.yellow, --[[ ... ]] -- no `green`
  hint = p.cyan,   -- classic green sneak-point, pinned to cyan on purpose
  ok   = p.green,  -- green leaks ONLY via namespaced aliases from here down:
}
c.diff.add, c.git.add, c.terminal.green = p.green -- diff / git / ANSI slot

-- theme.lua — groups get ONLY `c`; they never require the palette.
require("meowsoot.groups").setup(c, opts)

-- Result: in any group file, c.green == nil.
--   fg = c.yellow  -- ok
--   fg = c.green   -- nil → no green reaches code
-- Guarantee: unreachable is hard. "Fails loudly" only when nil is USED where
-- it errors (e.g. blend(c.green, ...)); a bare `fg = c.green` silently no-ops.

Building it (with a co-pilot)

Under the hood it’s pure Lua with zero runtime dependencies. The architecture leans heavily on tokyonight — folke’s module layout and caching are excellent and I saw no reason to reinvent them. The one thing I wanted to do my own way was author colors on the plain HSL wheel, so the little ~50-line HSL→hex engine at the center is mine.

I’ll be straight about this, same as I was when I posted it: I built a lot of it with AI. Without that speedup I’d never have found the time to stand up this much scaffolding — the HSL engine, 22 plugin integrations, the generators for the matching terminal configs. It’s the thing that turned “someday” into an actual weekend.

Putting it out there

This is the first theme I’ve ever released publicly, so I did the scary thing and posted it to r/neovim. It went over better than I expected — and the best part wasn’t the upvotes, it was the feedback.

A few people asked for a cooler background — the calming-blues crowd who live in Rosé Pine. My main variant is staying warm; that’s the whole point of it. But it was the perfect excuse to add a second. So now there’s Moon, a cool blue-tinted dark variant, alongside the warm Night and the light Dawn — which one reviewer called “FANTASTIC!” Same six hues, three moods.

Try it

" Inside Neovim
:colorscheme meowsoot        " Night — warm, the default
:colorscheme meowsoot-moon   " Moon — cool, blue-tinted
:colorscheme meowsoot-dawn   " Dawn — light

It ships with a bundled lualine theme and terminal configs regenerated from the same palette, so your Ghostty / Kitty / WezTerm / Tmux / Fish can match the editor. Needs Neovim 0.9+.

Grab it on GitHub. And if you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think — the green thing is a hill I’m happy to defend.