meowsoot.nvim

A pink–cyan–lavender Neovim colorscheme. Strings are yellow, functions are pink, types are lavender — and green never reaches code.

Pure Lua. Zero runtime dependencies. Authored in HSL, AAA contrast on the night variant.

Why meowsoot

• No green in code. Most schemes use green for strings or comments. meowsoot reroutes the chroma — strings are yellow, types are lavender, functions are pink, keywords are cyan. The result is a syntax surface that's immediately recognisable in any screenshot. The invariant is structural, not stylistic — green isn't on the c table that group files can see, so a regression would fail loudly at load time. Green still appears in the only places that need it: diff add, git add, success states, the ANSI terminal slot.
• Six chromatic accents, tuned together. Anchored at 190° · 208° · 275° · 328° · 20° · 50° — cyan, blue, lavender, pink, peach, yellow. Warm-biased. Three lightness tiers per accent (ANCHOR / STANDARD / QUIET) so the visual hierarchy of the syntax tree comes through without arbitrary highlight noise.
• Pure Lua, zero dependencies. ~50-line HSL → hex engine. No plenary, no required treesitter, no lush.nvim. Loads fast, caches compiled highlights, easy to fork.
• 22 plugin integrations, auto-detected via lazy.nvim. Telescope, fzf-lua, Snacks, Gitsigns, nvim-cmp, blink.cmp, mini.*, noice, which-key, trouble, render-markdown, treesitter-context, flash, lazy.nvim, nvim-tree, indent-blankline. Bundled lualine theme.
• Ecosystem in the box. Matching configs for Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, Tmux, Fish, and fzf live in extras/, regenerated from the same palette. Your editor identity carries through to your shell.

Palette

Both variants are resolved from the same HSL source of truth (lua/meowsoot/palette.lua). The tables below are regenerated whenever the palette changes — run just extras to refresh. Hex values are real text, so you can select and copy them.

Night

Accents

Swatch	Name	Hex	Role
	pink	#eaa4c9	functions, methods, headings
	lavender	#cca6e7	types, classes, modules
	cyan	#96d8e3	keywords, imports, tags, builtins
	peach	#e3b096	constants, booleans
	blue	#96bddf	ANSI 4/12, diff-change, info
	yellow	#dfd286	strings, regex

Neutrals

Swatch	Name	Hex	Role
	bg_deep	#100f0f	darkest panel
	bg_0	#171616	editor background
	bg_1	#201f1d	panel
	bg_2	#282625	active line
	bg_3	#353331	selection
	bg_4	#454240	border
	fg_faint	#85807a	gutter, punctuation, operators
	fg_mute	#b1ada9	comments
	fg	#e2e0df	foreground

Dawn

Accents

Swatch	Name	Hex	Role
	pink	#911256	functions, methods, headings
	lavender	#6a2c96	types, classes, modules
	cyan	#187a8b	keywords, imports, tags, builtins
	peach	#a34414	constants, booleans
	blue	#25659d	ANSI 4/12, diff-change, info
	yellow	#917112	strings, regex

Neutrals

Swatch	Name	Hex	Role
	bg_deep	#e8e3de	darkest panel
	bg_0	#f9f6f1	editor background
	bg_1	#e6e0db	panel
	bg_2	#f2eee9	active line
	bg_3	#d7cac1	selection
	bg_4	#b0998d	border
	fg_faint	#9c948b	gutter, punctuation, operators
	fg_mute	#7e7063	comments
	fg	#3c312a	foreground

The night variant is the main act; dawn is a complementary light counterpart with the same hue identity, tier-inverted for readability on cream.

Showcase

The full editor surface. File tree, split buffers, lualine — all keyed to the same six-hue chromatic system.

Markdown via render-markdown.nvim. The rainbow heading wash, fenced code blocks, badges, inline links — all in palette.

Pickers. Fuzzy file search floating over a code buffer.

Git surface. Log view with an inline commit diff. The only place green is allowed to appear — for add lines and nothing else.

Dawn variant. The same scene in light mode — same hue identity, tier-inverted for readability on warm cream.

Terminal ecosystem. Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, Tmux, and Fish all themed via the extras/ configs, regenerated from the same palette.

The story

A fusion of two ideas. The charcoal background is inspired by Susuwatari — the wandering soot sprites from Studio Ghibli films. The pink and peach accents are inspired by Nyan Cat's pop-tart palette. The rest of the colors — cyan, lavender, yellow, blue — were tuned to round out the chromatic system.

The dawn variant carries the same hue identity onto a warm cream background: the same soot sprites, woken up at sunrise.

Install

Requires Neovim 0.9+. No external dependencies.

lazy.nvim

{
  "marekh19/meowsoot.nvim",
  lazy = false,
  priority = 1000,
  config = function()
    vim.cmd.colorscheme("meowsoot")
  end,
}

Local development

{
  dir = "/path/to/meowsoot",
  lazy = false,
  priority = 1000,
  config = function()
    vim.cmd.colorscheme("meowsoot")
  end,
}

Configuration

All options are optional. Defaults shown.

require("meowsoot").setup({
  style = "night",                -- "night" (dark) | "dawn" (light)
  transparent = false,            -- transparent backgrounds
  terminal_colors = true,         -- set vim.g.terminal_color_0..15

  styles = {
    comments  = { italic = true },
    keywords  = {},
    functions = {},
    variables = {},
    sidebars  = "dark",           -- "dark" | "transparent" | "normal"
    floats    = "dark",
  },

  -- Plugin highlight groups. Auto-detected via lazy.nvim if `auto = true`.
  plugins = {
    all  = false,
    auto = true,
    -- Force-enable / disable individual plugins:
    -- telescope = true,
    -- gitsigns = false,
  },

  cache = true,                   -- cache compiled highlights to disk

  on_colors = function(c) end,    -- mutate the color table
  on_highlights = function(hl, c) end, -- mutate the highlight table
})
vim.cmd.colorscheme("meowsoot")

Variants

Two ways to pick a variant:

require("meowsoot").setup({ style = "dawn" })
vim.cmd.colorscheme("meowsoot")

Or skip setup entirely and use the per-variant entry point:

:colorscheme meowsoot          " night
:colorscheme meowsoot-dawn     " dawn

To flip variants with :set background=light / dark, wire an autocmd:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("OptionSet", {
  pattern = "background",
  callback = function()
    vim.cmd.colorscheme(vim.o.background == "light" and "meowsoot-dawn" or "meowsoot")
  end,
})

Lualine

Use the bundled lualine theme:

require("lualine").setup({ options = { theme = "meowsoot" } })

It reads the active variant from vim.o.background and re-resolves on every :colorscheme switch, so it stays in sync.

Plugins covered out of the box

gitsigns · telescope · nvim-cmp · blink.cmp · lazy.nvim · flash.nvim · nvim-tree · indent-blankline · treesitter-context · snacks.nvim · mini.icons / mini.files / mini.statusline / mini.indentscope / mini.diff / mini.notify / mini.pick · noice · which-key · trouble · render-markdown · fzf-lua

Extras (terminal / multiplexer / shell)

Pre-generated configs live in extras/:

Tool	File
Ghostty	extras/ghostty/meowsoot
Kitty	extras/kitty/meowsoot.conf
Alacritty	extras/alacritty/meowsoot.toml
WezTerm	extras/wezterm/meowsoot.toml
Tmux	extras/tmux/meowsoot.tmux
Fish	extras/fish/meowsoot.fish
fzf	extras/fzf/meowsoot.conf

These are output artifacts — don't edit by hand, they get overwritten on regeneration. They're pinned to the night palette so the terminal identity stays canonical even if you switch the editor to dawn.

Regenerating

After tuning lua/meowsoot/palette.lua:

just extras

Built by a small Lua generator (lua/meowsoot/extras/) using only headless Neovim — no external build dependencies. The README palette tables and swatches (static/swatches/) are regenerated by the same target.

Hacking the palette

Authored in HSL ({h, s, l}) for ergonomic tuning on the color wheel, resolved to hex at load time via lua/meowsoot/hsl.lua. Edit lua/meowsoot/palette.lua to shift hues / saturation / lightness; the rest of the theme follows automatically.

No green in code — enforcement

Green never reaches a syntax group. The chokepoint is lua/meowsoot/colors.lua — green is intentionally not exposed as a top-level key on the resolved colors table. Code-shaped group files (groups/base.lua syntax section, groups/treesitter.lua, groups/semantic_tokens.lua, groups/kinds.lua) cannot reach it. Green leaks only through the semantic aliases c.git.add, c.diff.add, c.ok, c.terminal.green, and the mini.icons UI category.

Recipes

Recipe	What it does
just check	Headless smoke-test: load the colorscheme, fail on errors
just extras	Regenerate everything under extras/ plus static/palette.svg
just fmt	Run stylua over lua/ and colors/
just check-fmt	Verify stylua formatting (exits non-zero if dirty)
just cache-clean	Drop the compiled-highlights cache

Architecture

Inspired by tokyonight.nvim.

lua/meowsoot/
  init.lua            -- setup(opts) / load()
  config.lua          -- defaults + user-merge
  theme.lua           -- orchestrator: colors → groups → nvim_set_hl
  util.lua            -- blend / darken / lighten / template / cache
  hsl.lua             -- HSL ↔ hex (~50 lines, no dependencies)
  palette.lua         -- HSL palette (single source of truth, both variants)
  colors.lua          -- HSL → hex + semantic alias layer ("no green in code" chokepoint)
  groups/
    init.lua          -- aggregator: cache, plugin auto-detect via lazy
    base.lua          -- editor UI + native Syntax/* + diff/git UI
    treesitter.lua    -- @* groups
    semantic_tokens.lua  -- @lsp.*
    kinds.lua         -- LSP kind helper
    plugins/          -- per-plugin overrides
  extras/             -- ghostty / kitty / alacritty / wezterm / tmux / fish / fzf / palette-md generators