Slatewave for delta

About this theme

delta drives every diff color through ~/.gitconfig. Slatewave maps its style keys onto the family palette — desaturated rose/teal tints behind syntax-colored content, brighter emph for changed bytes, teal hunk headers in a slate box, amber line-number math, and a slate blame palette.

Slatewave for delta recolors every visible role in delta’s output — minus / plus, emph / non-emph, hunk header, file header, commit metadata, line numbers, blame, merge conflicts, grep — onto the same slate / teal / rose / amber vocabulary the rest of the family speaks.

The minus and plus backgrounds are deliberately desaturated so the syntax foreground stays readable against them; the emph styles are saturated so the bytes that actually changed inside a line jump out. The hunk header is teal-300 inside a slate-600 box with amber line-number math, so the @@ -12,7 +12,9 @@ jump pops without taking over the diff.

Pairs with bat-slatewave, which provides the Slatewave syntax theme delta reads via syntax-theme. Without bat-slatewave installed, any built-in bat theme works — base16-256 is a sensible neutral fallback. After installing bat-slatewave, run bat cache --build once so delta can resolve the theme by name.

Verify

Pipe a diff into delta and confirm the look — desaturated wine/teal minus/plus blocks, a teal-bordered hunk header, and amber line-number math:

git -C any-repo log -p | head -60