SP Night for Alacritty

The sodium lamp turns the whole city this colour.
A dark colour scheme with São Paulo as its reference — the sodium street lamp,
exposed concrete, the free span of the MASP, the drizzle before the rain.

sp-night.github.io  ·  palette  ·  spec  ·  ports

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The flavours

All three are dark, by decision. The previews below are synthetic — drawn from the palette itself, so they can never drift from what you install.

Noite Paulista — sp_night_noite.toml

The city at 3am. Blue-violet dark, the sodium lamp burning warm on top.

Garoa — sp_night_garoa.toml

The same window, seen through the drizzle. Flat grey — the garoa does not cool the city down, it washes it out.

Pico do Jaraguá — sp_night_jaragua.toml

The same night, seen from the city's highest point. Near-black surfaces, with the forest left to the accents — and the red-and-white tower lit at the summit.

Install

Alacritty imports a theme from its own config, so the file sits beside alacritty.toml and nothing overwrites it. The config format has been TOML since 0.13.

Grab the flavour you want (or all three):

mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty/themes
curl -Lo ~/.config/alacritty/themes/sp_night_noite.toml \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sp-night/alacritty/main/themes/sp_night_noite.toml

Then import it from ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml:

[general]
import = ["~/.config/alacritty/themes/sp_night_noite.toml"]

Alacritty watches its configuration and reloads on save, so the colours change as you write the file. If yours does not, set general.live_config_reload = true.

Note

import lived at the top level until Alacritty 0.14 moved it into [general]. On 0.13, drop the [general] header and keep the bare import = [...]. TOML reads a bare key as belonging to whatever table precedes it, so it has to come before every [...] header in the file.

Prefer a checkout? Clone and copy, the files are plain text and there is no build:

git clone https://github.com/sp-night/alacritty.git
cp alacritty/themes/*.toml ~/.config/alacritty/themes/

Two keys the theme deliberately leaves alone, both for one reason: this project does not ship a colour nobody measured.

[colors.dim] is absent. The palette's bright ladder covers the six ANSI accents and stops there, so there is no measured dim set to write, and Alacritty derives faint text on its own.

draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors is absent because it is behaviour rather than colour. Set it in your own config if you want bold text to use [colors.bright]; the theme will not decide that for you.

primary.bright_foreground was on that list until the palette gained fg_vivo. It is set now, to the same value ansi.bright_white carries — a measured colour rather than a brightened guess, which is what put it on the list in the first place.

What gets themed

Alacritty key	Role	Meaning
colors.normal.* / colors.bright.*	ansi.*	the full 16-colour ANSI mapping
colors.primary.background / .foreground	ui.bg / ui.fg	laje under the main text
colors.primary.dim_foreground	ui.fg_dim	faint text recedes to the measured dim, not to a multiplier
colors.cursor.cursor / .text	ui.cursor / ui.on_accent	the sódio cursor, dark text inside it
colors.vi_mode_cursor.cursor / .text	ui.accent_alt / ui.on_accent	vi mode is a different mode, so the cursor changes hue rather than brightness
colors.selection.background / .text	ui.selection / ui.fg	vidro, glass reflecting the street
colors.search.matches	ui.match / ui.on_accent	every hit in táxi, the colour this theme uses for a match
colors.search.focused_match	ui.accent / ui.on_accent	the hit you are on takes the signature colour, so the cursor is never lost in the crowd
colors.hints.start / .end	ui.accent / ui.panel	the key to press next is loud, the rest of the label stays concrete
colors.footer_bar	ui.panel / ui.fg	the search prompt and URI preview sit on exposed concrete
colors.line_indicator	ui.bg_deep / ui.fg_dim	the position readout recedes into the vão

No hex in this repo was picked by hand. Every value comes from the SP Night palette through its role layer, both published as data: palette.json and roles.json. The contrast floors those colours have to clear are written down in the spec and enforced in CI.

The mapping

alacritty.toml.tmpl is the full record of which Alacritty key means which role — the table above in complete form. The files in themes/ are what it resolves to, one per flavour.

You never need it to use the theme: the shipped files are plain text and final. It is here so the mapping survives, and so a retuned palette can be rolled through this port without anyone re-deciding which colour the focused search hit takes.

License

MIT