PSA for color scheme authors: you might want to adjust PmenuSel
Originally posted on Reddit
TL;DR: to account for possible new custom highlighting in popup menu items, you might want to switch fg and bg colors in Pmenu*Sel groups while adding reverse attribute.
Neovim Nightly (0.11) recently landed new features regarding adding custom highlighting to items of built-in popup menu:
- Whole item via
hl_group(thanks to glepnir). - Only “kind” field via
kind_hlgroup(also thanks to glepnir).
Both of the fields combine highlight attributes with underlying highlighting from Pmenu* groups. This is a great choice because it allows plugin authors to use highlight groups which modify only foreground (a.k.a. text) and it will “reuse” background of popup menu. An alternative would have been to expose special highlight groups which each color scheme would have needed to define (while only adding its own popup menu background).
Item highlighting usually should work well with displaying text in regular popup menu item (if it has background similar to Normal in terms of lightness), but might result into barely readable text when item is selected. This can be the case if color scheme chooses for PmenuSel (and its variants like PmenuKindSel, etc.) to have intentionally inverted lightness compared to Pmenu. I’ve encountered this with ‘mini.hues’ and default color scheme (which is planned to be fixed).
Luckily, there is a solution, albeit a bit unintuitive one: switch fg<->bg attributes and add reverse attribute. Here is an example from bundled ‘evening’ color scheme:
- Current:
hi PmenuSel guifg=#000000 guibg=#bebebe gui=NONE cterm=NONE
hi PmenuMatchSel guifg=#8b008b guibg=#bebebe gui=NONE cterm=NONE- Adjusted
PmenuSel:
hi PmenuSel guifg=#bebebe guibg=#000000 gui=reverse cterm=reverse
hi PmenuMatchSel guifg=#bebebe guibg=#8b008b gui=reverse cterm=reverseHere is a screenshot of before (left) and after (right)
This works because combining highlight attributes first combines foreground/background colors and only after that applies reverse. It will keep the same visuals if there is no highlighting, but should also work with reasonable choices of hl_group and kind_hlgroup in completion items.
If you are a color scheme author or a concerned user of one, I think making this change is worth it. You can use the test code example from PR to default color scheme. Hope it helps.