torte colorscheme's usage of highlight groups is suboptimal

[Tachi107]

Hi! I'm opening this issue mentioning the torte colorscheme only since that's what I use, but this likely applies to others.

When using LSP Semantic Highlight, which properly marks functions, identifiers, etc., with the appropriate highlight groups, most of the code becomes of the same color, and readability is worsened.

The retrobox theme, for example, doesn't have this issue, since it maps Function to a different color.

Please see yegappan/lsp#483 for further details.

Bye!

[romainl]

Our modernization efforts were mostly focused on:

• bringing some coherence to the legacy colorschemes,
• adding support for the many features that were added to Vim in the decades since their inclusion.

Tough choices had to be made, sometimes, but we generally respected the design choices of the original authors.

One such design choice, that all legacy colorschemes had in common, was that they were originally designed as "overlays" for the default colorscheme. They only redefined a bunch of highlight groups, leaving the rest untouched, and we mostly respected that. Even if we don't necessarily agree with it. Our goal was not to design a new torte or a new pablo, but to refresh them, so to speak.

Of the 17 legacy colorschemes, only three explicitly defined the Function highlight group: elflord, industry, and slate and so do their remakes. The others link Function to Identifier, like default has always done and like the originals did.

Of the 8 new colorschemes, only two explicitly define Function: retrobox and unokai.

Choosing to give Function a separate look from Identifier is a design choice that colorscheme authors might or might not make. Explicitly supporting third-party plugins or not is another choice that can be made, and one we decided against as we started this project. We think it is a can of worm that we don't want to open.

Speaking of choices, Vim links Function to Identifier by default. Most colorschemes distributed with Vim do the same. Some don't. Some third-party colorschemes do, others don't. The plugin author apparently makes the mistake of assuming that Function and Identifier look different while this is not the case out of the box.

So, what can you do?

• Out of the 26 colorschemes distributed with Vim, 5 accidentally support what you and your plugin are trying to do so there is nothing particularly blocking, here. Use one of those and you are good.

• If you absolutely want torte to have a special color for Function, you can do what is described under :help colorscheme-override:

  augroup MyColorOverrides
      autocmd ColorScheme torte hi Function guibg=NONE ctermfg=red ctermbg=NONE ctermfg=red
  augroup END
  colorscheme torte
  

• Remind the plugin's author that Function and Identifier are identical by default, which might force him to make some changes to his code.