South

A bright, summery Emacs theme 🌱☀️🌊

I love the Nord theme and regularly use the doom-themes port. It’s a dark, muted, cool theme that’s easy on the eyes.

For some time, I searched for an equivalent light theme to use in the day time, but couldn’t find any I liked as much as the Nord theme, so I decided to make my own.

Inspired by Nord, South uses mostly greens and blues, and has low contrast between the different text colours.

The text colours are WCAG AA compliant against the background, except the colour used for the font-lock-comment-face, but not WCAG AAA compliant.

I’ve used the very convenient package autothemer to create the theme, which greatly simplified things. I’d heartily recommend it.

Note:

South is a work in progress and is subject to constant change, at the whims of the author benevolent dictator.

Screenshots

Org Mode

Big screenshot, small text, showing a regular org-mode document with different text styles, an agenda, and some tables.

Clojure Code

Some example code, showing Flycheck at work.

Installation

Manual Installation

Clone this repository, usually to some location within your .emacs.d directory:

# With SSH:
git@github.com:SophieBosio/south.git

# With https:
https://github.com/SophieBosio/south.git

And load the file somewhere in your init.el:

(load "path/to/south-theme/south-theme.el")

use-package

With Emacs 30+, you can install packages via version control directly with use-package:

(use-package south-theme
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/SophieBosio/south"
       :rev :newest
       :branch "main"))

Support

Since I developed South for my own personal use, I have only implemented support for the packages I use or have used. Pull requests welcome for additional support.

Otherwise, you can install the theme, use M-x find-library RET south-theme RET to open the source code, edit at will, evaluate the buffer and reload the theme.

Currently, South theme defines faces for font lock faces, implicitly supporting most programming languages, and faces for the following packages:

• ag
• cider
• company-mode
• consult
• corfu
• diff-hl
• flycheck
• lsp-mode
• magit
• orderless
• org-mode
• vertico

Ports

I was pretty stoked to see that this theme has been ported - maybe to your favourite editor? Thanks to Michael Kohl (@citizen428) for showing me these ports 😊

VS Code

https://github.com/citizen428/south-vscode - by @citizen428

or, directly in the VS Code marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=citizen428.south

NeoVim

https://github.com/arnauKL/south.nvim - by @arnauKL

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Copyright 2024-2025 (c) Sophie Bosio