Helm chooses unreadable highlight colors in solarized-dark

Question

I'm experimenting with helm, after using icicles for a long time.

I used the popular solarized-dark colour scheme by default most of the time, and helm seems to be choosing particularly unreadable colors:

...how can I advise helm to select more useful colors? Hopefully so it works well when I switch to solarized-light as well.

Astomatous

Why not report a bug to the maintainers of this color theme? – Blunt

is it a colour scheme bug? or a helm bug? or an emacs bug? or a life bug? – Astomatous

It is obviously a shortcoming of the color theme, which fails to address Helm faces. – Blunt

Answer 1

When I first tried the solarized theme, I had a similar problem with helm menus as shown above. The highlighting on diff and magit were even worse.

I started to try to fix this myself but I eventually realized that there are at least three different versions of the solarized theme currently in MELPA. The one called solarized-theme is the one you want. The helm selection bar is very subtle and underlined, like below.

Charwoman

I came to the same conclusion a few days ago, and have been happy since. Tick for you! – Astomatous

Answer 2

You can try M-x customize-group RET helm from there you can customize Helm Selection face and other helm faces.

Unaffected

This is one solution, but the real solution is to add the faces to your theme and send a Pull-request to the maintainer. – Aluminize

A specific solution which I use in my emacs.d (for one of the Tomorrow themes): (set-face-attribute 'helm-selection nil :background "#441100") – Pansy

Wow. The interactive face editing in Emacs is really impressive and easy to use. – Rayon