Emacs Color Theme Switcher

I recently started using color theme modern, in place of custom themes, because color themes can be undone more easily—see Custom Theme Compared to Color Theme for a comparison¹.

Color Theme provides various themes and the GitHub repository has a page with screenshots. One can enable a theme by name, but the theme has to be loaded first and the old theme manually disabled.

However, I could not find an equivalent to the customize interface, which lists all available themes and allows switching to a theme by clicking on its name. I thus decided to write a couple of functions and an Org Mode to make color theme selection more similar to the one provided by custom themes.

The support functions, to be put your .emacs.el initialization file, enable all color themes and define two functions, color-theme-preview and color-theme-switch. The former loads the GitHub page with the previews and the second opens an Org Mode file with all the themes, from which you can select the one you like.

(require 'color-theme-modern nil t)

(setq all-themes
      '(aalto-dark aalto-light aliceblue andreas arjen beige-diff beige-eshell bharadwaj-slate bharadwaj
                   billw black-on-gray blippblopp blue-erc blue-eshell blue-gnus blue-mood blue-sea
                   calm-forest charcoal-black clarity classic cobalt comidia dark-blue dark-blue2 dark-erc
                   dark-font-lock dark-gnus dark-green dark-info dark-laptop deep-blue desert digital-ofs1
                   emacs-21 emacs-nw euphoria feng-shui fischmeister gnome gnome2 goldenrod gray1 gray30
                   greiner gtk-ide high-contrast hober infodoc jb-simple jedit-grey jonadabian-slate
                   jonadabian jsc-dark jsc-light jsc-light2 katester kingsajz late-night lawrence ld-dark
                   lethe marine marquardt matrix midnight mistyday montz oswald parus pierson pok-wob pok-wog
                   ramangalahy raspopovic renegade resolve retro-green retro-orange robin-hood rotor ryerson
                   salmon-diff salmon-font-lock scintilla shaman simple-1 sitaramv-nt sitaramv-solaris snow
                   snowish standard-ediff standard subtle-blue subtle-hacker taming-mr-arneson taylor
                   tty-dark vim-colors whateveryouwant wheat word-perfect xemacs xp julie subdued railscast
                   ))
(mapcar (lambda (x) (load-theme x t t)) all-themes)

(defun color-theme-preview ()
  "Go to the GitHub repository and preview themes"
  (interactive)
  (eww "https://github.com/emacs-jp/replace-colorthemes/blob/master/screenshots.md"))

(defun color-theme-switch ()
  "Open the color-theme-switcher page and select a theme"
  (interactive)
  (find-file (expand-file-name "~/Sources/elisp/color-theme-switcher.org")))

Notice that you might want to update the path of the filename in the color-switch-function.

The Org Mode file opened by color-theme-switch has a list of links, which switch theme, when clicked, as demonstrated by the following video:

The Org Mode file is available here.

If, for any reason, you want to update the list of themes, M-x org-babel-execute-buffer will execute the code embedded in the Org Mode file.

Footnotes:

color theme modern is a re-implementation of Color Theme.