meowsoot.nvim

July 19, 2026 · View on GitHub

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.

meowsoot.nvim

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.

Showcase

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

editor surface

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

markdown rendering

Pickers. Fuzzy file search floating over a code buffer.

picker over code

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

git log and inline diff

Moon — cool dark variant. The same buffer as the hero up top, neutrals rotated to a calm blue.

moon variant

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

dawn variant

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

ghostty, tmux, fish

All three 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.

Full swatch tables — Night · Moon · Dawn (click to expand)

Night

Accents

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

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
indent	`#484542`	indent guides
fg_faint	`#85807a`	gutter, punctuation, operators
comment	`#837d77`	comments
fg_mute	`#b1ada9`	docs, folds, diagnostics, statusline
fg	`#e2e0df`	foreground

Moon

Accents

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

Name	Hex	Role
bg_deep	`#101218`	darkest panel
bg_0	`#171921`	editor background
bg_1	`#20222c`	panel
bg_2	`#272935`	active line
bg_3	`#353746`	selection
bg_4	`#404454`	border
indent	`#434656`	indent guides
fg_faint	`#797e96`	gutter, punctuation, operators
comment	`#797e9a`	comments
fg_mute	`#a0a5ba`	docs, folds, diagnostics, statusline
fg	`#d9dbe8`	foreground

Dawn

Accents

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

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
indent	`#cec9c5`	indent guides
fg_faint	`#9c948b`	gutter, punctuation, operators
comment	`#897a6c`	comments
fg_mute	`#7e7063`	docs, folds, diagnostics, statusline
fg	`#3c312a`	foreground

The night variant is the main act. moon is a cool, blue-tinted dark counterpart — same accents, neutrals rotated to a calm blue (H≈230°) for a Rosé-Pine-Moon mood. dawn is a complementary light counterpart with the same hue identity, tier-inverted for readability on cream.

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" (warm dark) | "moon" (cool 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 = "moon" })
vim.cmd.colorscheme("meowsoot")

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

:colorscheme meowsoot          " night (warm dark, default)
:colorscheme meowsoot-moon     " moon (cool dark)
:colorscheme meowsoot-dawn     " dawn (warm light)

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 (vim.g.meowsoot_style, falling back to 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/, one file per palette variant. Night is the canonical default — it keeps the unsuffixed filename; moon and dawn add a -<variant> suffix.

Tool	Night (default)	Moon	Dawn
Ghostty	`extras/ghostty/meowsoot`	`extras/ghostty/meowsoot-moon`	`extras/ghostty/meowsoot-dawn`
Kitty	`extras/kitty/meowsoot.conf`	`extras/kitty/meowsoot-moon.conf`	`extras/kitty/meowsoot-dawn.conf`
Alacritty	`extras/alacritty/meowsoot.toml`	`extras/alacritty/meowsoot-moon.toml`	`extras/alacritty/meowsoot-dawn.toml`
WezTerm	`extras/wezterm/meowsoot.toml`	`extras/wezterm/meowsoot-moon.toml`	`extras/wezterm/meowsoot-dawn.toml`
Tmux	`extras/tmux/meowsoot.tmux`	`extras/tmux/meowsoot-moon.tmux`	`extras/tmux/meowsoot-dawn.tmux`
Fish	`extras/fish/meowsoot.fish`	`extras/fish/meowsoot-moon.fish`	`extras/fish/meowsoot-dawn.fish`
fzf	`extras/fzf/meowsoot.conf`	`extras/fzf/meowsoot-moon.conf`	`extras/fzf/meowsoot-dawn.conf`

WezTerm loads schemes by internal name, so the variant files declare meowsoot-moon / meowsoot-dawn (matching the filename) — set config.color_scheme accordingly. Every other tool loads by file path.

These are output artifacts — don't edit by hand, they get overwritten on regeneration.

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, all 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