Reducing the brightness of normal text without affecting other elements

[antoineco]

I have found the colors of the colorscheme to be quite calming for longer coding sessions in general. However, one thing has been bothering me: I find the normal foreground-on-background contrast in dark mode to be as bright as the sun, even with the soft background option. This has been especially perceptible to me while writing long-form text, like in Markdown documents.

I had been rolling with a modified fg color alone for a while, originally:

{
    mellifluous = {
        bg_contrast = "soft",
        color_overrides = {
            dark = {
                fg = "#c7c7c7"  -- bg:with_lightness(87) -> bg:with_lightness(80)
                                -- #dadada -> #c7c7c7
            }
        }
    }
}

However, this change had a ripple effect since secondary fg values are determined based on the value of colors.fg:

mellifluous.nvim/lua/mellifluous/utils/shader.lua

Lines 25 to 27 in 234c05d

	function M.add_shades(shade_recipes, colors)
	local fg = colors.shades_fg or colors.fg
	local shaded_colors = {}

That snippet above made me aware of the existence of shades_fg, which is currently used only in the alduin color set but can be used to achieve what I wanted to do, without affecting UI elements:

{
    mellifluous = {
        bg_contrast = "soft",
        color_overrides = {
            dark = {
                fg = "#c7c7c7",        -- bg:with_lightness(87) -> bg:with_lightness(80)
                shades_fg = "#dadada"  -- original fg color
            }
        }
    }
}

I thought I could share that little trick here, since it allows darkening the normal text a little bit without darkening anything else, and without having to override highlight groups individually (built-in, Tree-sitter, LSP semantic highlights, ...). Thanks Ramojus for having this built-in! 🙌

Here is the result (I used a humongous font size on purpose):

before

after

Despite the darkened fg, the difference with fg2 remains noticeable.