Base16 Project lives on (as Tinted Theming)

[belak]

We wanted to briefly document the recent happenings for those of you who’ve been involved and expressed excitement about the new organization and our hope to renew development and excitement in and around the Base16 (and peripheral) ecosystems.

Who are we?

The core organization team are all contributors to Chris’s original Base16 project and/or its many pieces of spec, schemes, tooling, templates, etc… Some of us have more than 5 years of experience working with the project. Between us we actively maintain the:

• base16 Go builder
• base16 Node.js builder
• base16-emacs
• base16-highlightjs
• base16-vim
• base16-shell
• base16-fzf

The Original Plan

When we began this project, the original idea was to migrate the base16 project to a GitHub organization for community maintenance and to solve the bus factor. Originally, this had seemed like something Chris didn’t fully see the need for but was “fine” with (given community support), as discussed in an older issue:

Chris: If someone wants to go ahead and create an organization and gets everyone to agree to putting their builders, schemes and templates in there then fair enough. Personally, I'm not so keen on the idea of having a base16 organization as I don't see the need but as I'm only interested in sharing my idea and helping others take this idea further, whatever the community sees as the best way to do this is fine by me.

So a new GitHub organization (base16-project) was created, repos were forked/copied/moved, links were updated, issues were opened, some real progress was made - and a full month passed (without incident).

What went wrong?

Unfortunately, we’re still a bit confused about that. Chris returned and for some reason appears to have had a change of heart. Perhaps some particular aspect of the transition upset him? We have no idea. Several of us have attempted to reach out (via multiple channels). He has actively blocked members of the new organization on GitHub, ignored our invitation to join, and declined all requests to communicate.

This first came to our attention when all of his base16 repos disappeared from GitHub - we assume he deleted them. After someone commented on their absence he added them back the next day - but their lengthy Git history is gone and he has changed the spec licensing from MIT to CC-BY-SA-4.0. He’s also suddenly turned off issues on many of his repositories.

Until and unless he gets in touch we’re still unclear about what exactly is going on.

What now?

Given the progress we've already made (including the big move to community ownership) we still believe the organization can provide real value, so we press forward. There was never any intention to take the base16 name against Chris’s wishes - so over the next month we’ll work towards renaming the organization and pivoting our focus. This should help avoid the confusion between two different projects named base16.

Our build tooling will continue to support version 0.2 of Chris’s base16 styling spec as a first class citizen. We have forked and consolidated schemes over to this repo for convenience. We had some great ideas for improving the base16 style spec. Now we’ll be coming up with a new name and new style spec for those ideas. We also plan to look into supporting a number of additional color scheme families in the future (such as base24 and a new one based on 16 ANSI colors).

How can you get involved?

We want to get the community excited and involved in working on styles, schemes, and templates again. We’d like to imagine the best things are yet to come.

We plan to have a list of public concrete goals once we manage to get some more momentum and discussions on some GitHub “issues”. If you’re interested in being involved in any area, we encourage you to start making PRs or issues on the organization's repositories.

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Editor's note: When this was written, the spec repo had been changed to CC-BY-SA-4.0, but it was later switched back to MIT.

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If you have any questions, concerns, or ideas, please feel free to bring them up in this companion issue.

[actionless]

please drop me a @ -mention when it will start to have some new features (like new template variables or other), so i will implement a new plugin in Themix app, separately from the current Base16 plugin