Question

I tried out the solarized theme (available from here) and really liked it. However, it somehow overwrites my whitespace settings and no matter how I configure the whitespace-face, it gets overwritten. Any ideas on how to control the color of my whitespaces while keeping the neat looking color-theme-solarized-dark?

From .emacs:

;;; Install colortheme
(add-to-list 'load-path "/home/blabla/.emacs.d/color-theme-6.6.0/")
(require 'color-theme)
(eval-after-load "color-theme"
  '(progn
     (color-theme-initialize)
     (color-theme-hober)))

;;; Install solarized
(add-to-list 'load-path "/home/blabla/.emacs.d/emacs-color-theme-solarized")
(require 'color-theme-solarized)
(color-theme-solarized-dark)

This was my previous setup:

(custom-set-faces
  '(whitespace-space ((((class color) (background light)) (:background "white" :foreground "darkgrey"))))
  '(whitespace-tab ((((class color) (background light)) (:background "white" :foreground "darkgrey")))))

The only thing I found to have any effect was:

(whitespace-space ((t (:background "red"))))

Of course, that just renders an ugly background for every white space.

Using GNU Emacs 23.3.1.

Answer 1

The version of Solarized here has all the faces needed for whitespace-mode to look good with Solarized. It’s for Emacs 24 (but may work on Emacs 23 as well if load-theme is present there) only though, but if you don’t want to use it you can simply copy the relevant colors into the definition of the color theme you’ve downloaded.