Ashen for Kakoune

Let the fire fade — not your focus.

Designed for long nights and longer thoughts.

Ashen is a warm, muted theme born from the glow of dying embers — rich in reds, orange highlights, and layers of gray. Inspired by Dark Souls III, it's crafted to be gentle on the eyes and steady on the mind. Whether you're deep in the terminal or writing code by candlelight — Ashen offers a calm, focused atmosphere for development after dark.

• Features
• Installation
  • Manual
  • kak-bundle
• Usage
  • Dynamic Cursor
  • EOL Cursors
  • Tree-Sitter
    • Setup
  • Kakoune LSP
  • Color Definitions
• Contributing

Features

• Warm, dark, and muted palette.
• kak-tree-sitter support.
  • Includes Helix capture groups (some extra setup necessary).
• kak-lsp support.
• Dynamic mode-indicating cursors (optional).
• Dynamic EOL cursors (optional).

Installation

Note

The light variant is experimental!

Manual

To get started, please download ashen.kak and place it inside your $kak_config/colors directory.

kak-bundle

Using kak-bundle, you can add the following to your kakrc:

bundle-theme kak-ashen https://git.ficd.sh/ficd/kak-ashen

Then, restart Kakoune and run the :bundle-install command. Restart Kakoune again for the theme to become available. You can update with the :bundle-update command at any time.

Usage

You can enable Ashen by executing the :colorscheme ashen command, or by adding colorscheme ashen to your kakrc.

Dynamic Cursor

Ashen also provides a dynamic cursor option, which is off by default. When it's enabled, the cursor changes color dynamically to indicate your current mode.

Normal Mode

Insert Mode

To enable the feature, set the ashen_dynamic_cursor option after loading the theme.

colorscheme ashen
set-option global ashen_dynamic_cursor true

EOL Cursors

Visually distinct EOL cursors are available as well.

Normal Mode

Insert Mode

To enable the feature, set the ashen_eol_cursor option after loading the theme.

colorscheme ashen
set-option global ashen_eol_cursor true

Tree-Sitter

With kak-tree-sitter:

Without kak-tree-sitter:

Setup

The kak-tree-sitter plugin is supported. You should take care to load Ashen after initializing kak-tree-sitter. Otherwise, kak-tree-sitter may overwrite some of our faces.

eval %sh{ kak-tree-sitter -dks --init $kak_session }
colorscheme ashen

Besides the plugin's default faces, Ashen also supports all of Helix's capture groups. In practice, this means that as long as you're using a highlights.scm query file taken from the Helix repository, the highlighting will look as close as possible to how it does in Ashen for Helix.

For this to work, you need to update your kak-tree-sitter configuration. Please add the following to your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kak-tree-sitter/config.toml:

[highlight]

groups = [
    "punctuation.bracket",
    "punctuation.delimiter",
    "constant.builtin",
    "constant.character.escape",
    "constant.numeric",
    "string.special.url",
    "comment.block.documentation",
    "keyword.operator",
    "markup.list",
]

Kakoune LSP

No additional setup is needed for kak-lsp integration.

Color Definitions

If you want to use Ashen's colors in your own scripts, they are available as Kakoune options:

%opt{cursorline} → rgb:191919
%opt{text} → rgb:b4b4b4
%opt{red_flame} → rgb:C53030
%opt{red_glowing} → rgb:DF6464
%opt{red_ember} → rgb:B14242
%opt{orange_glow} → rgb:D87C4A
%opt{orange_blaze} → rgb:C4693D
%opt{orange_muted} → rgb:6D3B22
%opt{orange_smolder} → rgb:E49A44
%opt{orange_golden} → rgb:E5A72A
%opt{golden_muted} → rgb:6D4D0D
%opt{brown} → rgb:89492a
%opt{brown_dark} → rgb:322119
%opt{blue} → rgb:4A8B8B
%opt{background} → rgb:121212
%opt{g_1} → rgb:e5e5e5
%opt{g_2} → rgb:d5d5d5
%opt{g_3} → rgb:b4b4b4
%opt{g_4} → rgb:a7a7a7
%opt{g_5} → rgb:949494
%opt{g_6} → rgb:737373
%opt{g_7} → rgb:535353
%opt{g_8} → rgb:323232
%opt{g_9} → rgb:212121
%opt{g_10} → rgb:1d1d1d
%opt{g_11} → rgb:191919
%opt{g_12} → rgb:151515