Syncing Tab Theme After Theme Load

Tue, Oct 1, 2024

Previously I wrote about the incompatibility of some Emacs themes with the tab-bar and my temporary fix:

The tab bar was introduced in Emacs 27.1, during which I created a function to apply some simple logic to make the tabs look moderately decent and fit in with the new theme. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was how to activate the function after a theme load, as there didn’t seem to be a hook.

Well, actually there does seem to be such a hook and it seems to have gone into Emacs 29. As with a lot of these little tweaks I found this on reddit in the emacs subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1ft3wwm/did_the_much_needed_theme_change_hook_arrive_with/

From my previous post I wrote :

Now that the defun is available, how to activate it? My first thought was to add a hook for when a theme is loaded, but there doesn’t seem to be such a feature!? I also tried advising around `load-theme`, but that didn’t go well either, it worked for themes that were not loaded, but for those that were, a change in state was not detected, and the tab theme tweak was not applied.

The solution is to simply add the following to your init file. Now that I know about this, I might even find some other use for it.

(defun my/after-theme-loaded(theme)
  (my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme))

(add-hook 'enable-theme-functions 'my/after-theme-loaded)

with the original my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme as follows:

(defun my/sync-tab-bar-to-theme ()
  "Synchronize tab-bar faces with the current theme."
  (interactive)
  (let ((default-bg (face-background 'default))
        (default-fg (face-foreground 'default))
        (inactive-fg (face-foreground 'mode-line-inactive))) ;; Fallback to mode-line-inactive
    (custom-set-faces
     `(tab-bar ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-bg :foreground ,default-fg))))
     `(tab-bar-tab ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-fg :foreground ,default-bg))))
     `(tab-bar-tab-inactive ((t (:inherit default :background ,default-bg :foreground ,inactive-fg)))))))

My tab theme fix is now activated on every theme load, and I no longer have to rely on muscle memory to make Emacs look colour-coherent when changing themes, which I do a lot!! 😀

Syncing Tab Theme After Theme Load

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