If you’ve worked on a color scheme for Vim, you’ll be familiar with Vim’s :hi command, which (without any additional arguments) lists all the text styles Vim knows about, along with the definition of that style and an example:
:hi
ErrorMsg xxx term=reverse cterm=reverse ctermfg=124 guifg=White guibg=Red
...
(it’s not apparent from that black-and-white screenshot, but in my Vim the “xxx” text is displayed black-on-red, an example of what that somewhat obtuse definition actually means)
If I want to pick a useful style for a highlighter, I can run :hi and browse the list looking for one that looks about right, and which is more-or-less semantically appropriate.
In Kakoune, the closest equivalent we have is the :debug faces command, which dumps faces and their definitions to the *debug* buffer, but does not display what the face looks like:
Faces:
* Default: default,default
* PrimarySelection: white,blue+Ffga
* SecondarySelection: black,blue+Ffga
...
And so, here’s a little command that fixes that problem. Just call :color-faces and you’ll be taken to the *debug* buffer with all the face-names highlighted in the appropriate face:
declare-option range-specs face_colors
define-command color-faces %{
buffer *debug*
debug faces
try %{ remove-highlighter buffer/face-colors }
set-option buffer face_colors %val{timestamp}
evaluate-commands -draft %{
execute-keys '%' s^Faces:\n(<space>\*<space>[^\n]*\n)*<ret>
execute-keys s ^<space>\*<space><ret>
execute-keys lt:
evaluate-commands -itersel %{
eval %sh{
printf "set-option -add buffer face_colors %s|%s\n" \
"$kak_selection_desc" "$kak_selection"
}
}
}
add-highlighter buffer/face-colors ranges face_colors
}