Wisteria – A Neovim Color Scheme Designed for Transparent Terminals

masisz — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 04:53:26 +0000

🎨 What is Wisteria?

Wisteria is a dark color scheme for Neovim, designed specifically to improve readability in transparent terminal environments. It features a calm and balanced palette built around soft purples, blues, and greens, aiming to provide a comfortable and immersive coding experience.

🌸 Color Concept

Wisteria is based on the color foundation of my previous work, ashikaga.nvim, and is inspired by traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Each color is carefully tuned using HSL to maintain clarity and harmony, especially when used with transparent backgrounds.

Flower Fuji – hsl(260, 40%, 70%)

The main wisteria purple, used for keywords and core syntax
Sky – hsl(199, 30%, 70%)

A refreshing light blue for functions and methods
Watarase Blue – hsl(240, 50%, 60%)

A deep blue for types and classes
Icho Green – hsl(133, 35%, 63%)

A calm green for strings
Orihime Red – hsl(0, 40%, 55%)

A gentle red for errors and highlights
Omugi Gold – hsl(46, 35%, 73%)

A warm gold for constants and numbers

✨ Key Features

1. Optimized for Transparent Backgrounds

Wisteria is designed with transparent terminals in mind. Even with background transparency enabled, text contrast remains clear and readable without being harsh on the eyes.

2. Native Support for Popular Plugins

Wisteria is designed for LazyVim and provides native styling for popular plugins:

lualine – status line
treesitter – syntax highlighting
neo-tree – file explorer
snacks – UI enhancements
markdown – Markdown preview
gitsigns – Git integration

3. Unified Terminal Experience

In addition to Neovim, Wisteria includes themes for related terminal tools. Special care has been taken to ensure that WezTerm and wisteria.nvim feel cohesive when transparency is enabled.

WezTerm – terminal emulator
Starship – shell prompt
tmux – terminal multiplexer

🚀 Installation

Using LazyVim

{
  "LazyVim/LazyVim",
  opts = {
    colorscheme = "wisteria",
  },
},
{
  "masisz/wisteria.nvim",
  name = "wisteria",
  opts = {
    transparent = true,
  },
},
{
  "nvim-lualine/lualine.nvim",
  opts = {
    theme = "wisteria",
  },
}

🎨 Related Tool Configuration

WezTerm

-- ~/.config/wezterm/wezterm.lua
local wisteria = require("path/to/wisteria.nvim/extras/wezterm/wisteria")

return {
  colors = wisteria.colors,
  -- other settings
}

Starship

Copy the configuration file:

cp extras/starship/starship.toml ~/.config/starship.toml

Or merge the palette into your existing configuration:

palette = "wisteria"

# Import the palette from extras/starship/starship.toml

tmux

# Add to ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf
source-file /path/to/wisteria.nvim/extras/tmux/wisteria.conf

# Reload tmux configuration
tmux source-file ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

🌈 Color Palette Details

Base Colors

Name	HSL	Usage
hanabi_night	`hsl(202, 10%, 15%)`	base background
flower_fuji	`hsl(260, 40%, 70%)`	keywords, identifiers
sky	`hsl(199, 30%, 70%)`	functions, methods
watarase_blue	`hsl(240, 50%, 60%)`	types, classes
icho_green	`hsl(133, 35%, 63%)`	strings
orihime_red	`hsl(0, 40%, 55%)`	errors
omugi_gold	`hsl(46, 35%, 73%)`	constants, numbers

Status Colors

Name	HSL	Usage
warning_orange	`hsl(25, 70%, 60%)`	warnings
error_red	`hsl(0, 70%, 60%)`	errors
info_blue	`hsl(199, 50%, 60%)`	information

💡 Tips

Enable Transparency

{
  "masisz/wisteria.nvim",
  opts = {
    transparent = true,
  },
}

Custom Color Overrides

You can further tweak the colors by extending the options:

{
  "masisz/wisteria.nvim",
  opts = {
    transparent = true,
    -- add custom overrides here
  },
}

🎯 Conclusion

Wisteria is especially recommended for developers who:

Prefer transparent terminal environments
Appreciate Japanese-inspired color aesthetics
Use LazyVim as their Neovim setup
Want a consistent theme across their entire development environment

🔗 Links

If you give Wisteria a try, I would really appreciate ⭐ stars on GitHub or ❤️ reactions on this article!

DEV Community: masisz