Customizing the Emacs Monokai Theme to have a more Sublime Text 2 look

Question

I am using Emacs Prelude. I didn't find most of the custom themes comfortable. I really liked Sublime Text 2's Monokai theme, so I installed the Monokai theme ported for Emacs. Though it is more or less similar to Sublime Text 2's Monokai, there are some differences which I want to correct, so as get my Emacs Monokai more close to Sublime's Monokai.

For example I don't want every Python keyword to be the bold pinkish. I would be prefer keywords like class,def to have a blue color than the pink ones and I would prefer the function arguments to have an orange color.

The Emacs Monokai theme seems to color the variable name to an orange color, which I don't want. How do I implement this? I checked the monokai-theme.el file, but I don't know what variable to edit and what variable to add to give the features in color changes I mentioned above.

Answer 1

I suppose you're referring to this version of Monokai?

You'll be able to make some of your changes, but without doing a huge amount of work some of them won't be feasible. This theme uses font-lock to identify many of the things to be coloured, and font-lock identifies all Python keywords the same way.

Have a look through the various font-lock variables in that file. This will give you a good idea of what you can easily change. For example, if you want to change variables from orange to something else, change

'(font-lock-variable-name-face
  (:foreground monokai-orange))

to use one of the other monokai- colour variables, or define your own.

If you're trying to figure out how a particular character is recognized by Emacs, move your cursor over that character and do C-u C-x = (C-u M-x what-cursor-position). This will show, among other things, the face for that character.