// the find
rougier/nano-emacs
GNU Emacs / N Λ N O - Emacs made simple
A set of Emacs Lisp files that restyle vanilla GNU Emacs into a clean, flat-design look (light theme off Material colors, dark theme off Nord), built around an arXiv paper the author wrote on text-editor design principles. It's aimed at Emacs users who want a more considered visual baseline without switching to Doom or Spacemacs.
Minimal footprint by design — only two font dependencies, no required package manager, and it patches vanilla Emacs faces rather than wrapping it in a framework. Genuinely modular: each concern (faces, modeline, layout, splash screen) is its own file, so you can lift just nano-faces.el and nano-modeline.el into an existing config instead of adopting the whole thing. The design choices are backed by actual written rationale (the linked paper) rather than just 'looks nice to me', which is rare for a theme repo.
Zero tests in the tree — for a project that pokes at face definitions and mode-specific faces across many built-in and third-party modes, there's no safety net when upstream Emacs changes break something silently. Several modules are labeled 'Experimental' (nano-mu4e, nano-minibuffer, nano-command, nano-agenda) with no indication of how long they've been stuck there or what 'experimental' means in practice — mu4e integration especially is the kind of thing that rots quietly. The visual design is explicitly tied to Roboto Mono and Fira Code; swap fonts and you lose 'many key design features' per the README, which is a tighter coupling than you'd expect from something pitched as low-dependency. It's distributed as a dotfiles-style repo with no MELPA package, versioning, or changelog, so pulling updates means manually re-diffing whatever files you copied in.