Paper is a little, minimal emacs theme that is meant to be simple and consistent. It was first intended to resemble the look of paper, but has diverged from that objective. Still, though, I keep calling it Paper, as I like that name. Paper uses a small colour palette over all the elements. Org headings are specially treated with a palette of equidistant colours. The colours and heading font sizes are calculated using base and factor values which can be edited. See source. It's most adapted for ELisp-Org users, as I'm one such user, though it works fine with Markdown, Textile, Python, JavaScript, Html, Diff, Magit, etc. ; Installation: Install it into a directory that's in the `custom-theme-load-path'. I recommend that you put that directory also in `load-path', so that you can `require' the `paper-theme'. Then adapt this snippet to your configuration. ;; Not necessary, but silences flycheck errors for referencing free ;; variables. (require 'paper-theme) ;; It's not necessary to modify these variables, they all have sane ;; defaults. (setf paper-paper-colour 'paper-parchment ; Custom background. paper-tint-factor 45) ; Tint factor for org-level-* faces ;; Activate the theme. (load-theme 'paper t) ; Customisation: It is possible to modify the base font size and the scaling factor for `org-level-faces' via the variables `paper-base-font-size' and `paper-font-factor' respectively. The factor for org-level-* colours are also configurable, adjust the variable `paper-tint-factor'. Various background colours are provided, see the docstring of the variable `paper-paper-colour' in order to find out how to switch them. You can add your custom colour for background without modifying this module: (push (list 'my-bgcolour "#000000") paper-colours-alist) (setf paper-paper-colour 'my-bgcolour) The following snippet will modify org-level-* faces so that initial stars in org headings are hidden and a Sans-serif font is used. Because the combination of heading font sizes and colours make levels obvious, it may be considered superfluous to have stars indicating depth: (setq org-hide-leading-stars nil) (set-face-attribute 'org-hide nil :height 0.1 :weight 'light :width 'extracondensed) (dolist (face org-level-faces) (set-face-attribute face nil :family "Sans Serif"))