Effect of doom themes in tabulated list header line is visually confusing

Question

I am on the process of moving from prelude [1] to a stand-alone config I have created from scratch [2], though by largely copying other people's .emacs. It seems I have inadvertently changed the rendering of the header line in tabulated mode [3], but I am struggling to find out how to configure this correctly. When using prelude, instances of tabulated mode are rendered like so (using doom-dark+ theme):

However, in my new .emacs I now get the following:

It appears I am now "overriding" the rendering of the header line somehow, but I am unsure as to what is causing this. Any pointers would be very helpful.

[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

[2] https://github.com/mcraveiro/cunene

[3] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs-lisp/tabulated-list.el

Answer 1

I haven't completely solved this problem, but I have found more details and a workaround. The gist of it is that doom-themes [1] appear to use the same face for the header-line as they do for the modeline, causing this visual confusion. There are several tickets open on this:

• doom-challenger-deep: not enough contrast for header-line #320
• header-line should not inherit mode-line #473

The workaround as per ticket #320 is:

(face-spec-set 'header-line '((t :background "#23214b")))

However, as you can see from the screenshots above, prelude - or my prelude config, not sure just yet - was doing something clever and setting up this face to a more sensible value. I will continue investigating, but this at least makes the theme usable.

[1] https://github.com/hlissner/emacs-doom-themes

Update

Found a much better solution to this problem. On the Emacs with prelude, I did customize-face for face header-line. There you can see all the properties for the face. I then did customize-face for the same face using my new configuration file, and replicated the configuration I had in prelude, and saved it to my custom file. The generated lisp is as follows:

(custom-set-faces
  ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
  ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
  ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
  ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
 '(header-line ((t (:inherit mode-line :background "#2b2b2b" :foreground "#f0dfaf" :box (:line-width -1 :color "#585858" :style released-button))))))

I could't quite replicate the grey colour on the border of the box, so #585858 is an approximation. However, the final result is very close:

FWIW, the options in custom were as follows: