mush.nvim

A high-contrast Neovim colorscheme with coordinated dark and light variants, careful Rust highlighting, and no runtime dependencies.

Mush uses near-black and near-white foundations with bright moss, rust, amber, cyan, blue, violet, pink, and red accents. The light variant uses deep, jewel-toned accents rather than pastels. Both variants preserve the same semantic color language, so switching themes does not require relearning what each color means.

Screenshots

Mush dark

Mush light

Requirements

• Neovim 0.11 or newer
• A terminal or GUI with true-color support is recommended

Mush does not enable termguicolors, change background, or require Tree-sitter, an LSP client, or any supported UI plugin. It includes 256-color fallbacks for terminals where termguicolors is disabled.

Installation

lazy.nvim

{
  "Tawxyn/mush.nvim",
  lazy = false,
  priority = 1000,
  config = function()
    require("mush").setup()
    vim.cmd.colorscheme("mush-dark")
  end,
}

vim.pack

vim.pack is available in Neovim 0.12 and newer. The colorscheme itself still supports Neovim 0.11.

vim.pack.add({
  "https://github.com/Tawxyn/mush.nvim",
})

require("mush").setup()
vim.cmd.colorscheme("mush-dark")

vim-plug

call plug#begin()
Plug 'Tawxyn/mush.nvim'
call plug#end()

colorscheme mush-dark

Manual package

Clone Mush into a start package directory:

git clone https://github.com/Tawxyn/mush.nvim \
  "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/nvim/site/pack/colors/start/mush.nvim"

Then load either variant from init.lua:

vim.cmd.colorscheme("mush-dark")
-- or:
vim.cmd.colorscheme("mush-light")

Both colorschemes work without calling setup().

Configuration

Call setup() before :colorscheme to change the defaults:

require("mush").setup({
  transparent = false,
  terminal_colors = true,
  styles = {
    comments = { italic = true },
    keywords = { bold = true },
    functions = { bold = false },
  },
})

vim.cmd.colorscheme("mush-dark")

Options:

Option	Default	Description
transparent	false	Clears editor, sign-column, end-of-buffer, and winbar backgrounds. Elevated floats and menus remain opaque.
terminal_colors	true	Sets Neovim's 16 terminal_color_* globals to the active Mush palette.
styles.comments	{ italic = true }	Highlight attributes applied to comments.
styles.keywords	{ bold = true }	Highlight attributes applied to keywords.
styles.functions	{ bold = false }	Highlight attributes applied to functions.

Every setup() call starts from the documented defaults. This prevents omitted values from a previous call leaking into later configuration.

Mush deliberately leaves vim.o.background, vim.o.termguicolors, and other user options untouched, even when switching between variants.

Rust highlighting

The Rust palette is designed to keep these categories visually distinct:

• types and structs use cyan; traits use violet; type parameters use bright cyan with an underline
• functions use blue, methods use brighter blue, and macros use bold rust
• enum variants and read-only semantic values use pink
• mutable semantic tokens are underlined while immutable values remain plain
• lifetimes use italic pink and loop labels use italic rust
• attributes use amber and macros, rather than comment styling
• unsafe semantic tokens use restrained italic rust
• self, Self, crate, modules, primitive types, and format specifiers have intentional mappings

Generic Tree-sitter captures provide syntax structure. rust-analyzer semantic tokens refine symbol meaning when an LSP is attached; neither integration is required for the colorscheme to load.

examples/rust.rs covers structs, enums, unions, aliases, traits, bounds, generics, associated types, functions, methods, closures, async, mutable and immutable values, constants, statics, lifetimes, macros, attributes, modules, patterns, unsafe code, FFI, Rustdoc, string forms, numeric literals, and Rust's special path keywords.

To inspect the fixture in Neovim:

:edit examples/rust.rs
:Inspect
:InspectTree

The fixture is also a small Cargo project:

cargo check --manifest-path examples/Cargo.toml

Plugin highlights

Mush defines lightweight highlight groups for:

• Telescope
• blink.cmp and nvim-cmp
• Gitsigns
• Neo-tree and nvim-tree
• Which-key
• Trouble

These definitions do not load, detect, or require the plugins.

Testing

Run the dependency-free headless suite with:

make test

The suite verifies direct loading, colors_name, representative highlight groups, repeated switching, transparent and opaque modes, terminal colors, configuration reset behavior, user-option preservation, and loading without optional providers or plugins.

License

Mush is available under the MIT License.