Most basic:

1. Optimized for terminal’s 256 color palettes.
2. Dark & Light

And more:

1. Carefully-considered & reasonable colors
2. Delightful & good-looking color palettes™
3. Customizable
   • Optional Monokai / Tomorrow for syntax-highlighting (or totally customize by yourself)
   • Mode-line / Powerline color
   • Titles font sizes for .
4. Fully-supported for each modes:
   • Diff / EDiff
   • Dired / Dired+
   • ERC / rcirc
   • Eshell / Ansi-term
   • Gnus / Message
   • Helm / ido
   • Org-mode / Agenda / calfw
   • Magit / Git-commit / Git-gutter
   • Markdown-mode / ReStructText-mode
   • Auto-complete-mode / Company
   • Rainbow-delimiters
   • Swoop
   • Twittering-mode
   • undo-tree / Neotree
   • Ruby / Haskell / CPerl / Tuareg / Web-mode
   • ......etc

• Emacs 25.3 or above.
• 256-colors (or higher) terminal.

Moe-theme is available in MELPA repository now, so you can install moe-theme easily with M-x list-packages.

Download the archive of moe-theme (or git clone it) to ~/.emacs.d/moe-theme.el and extract it. Then, add these to your init file:

;;customize theme
(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/moe-theme.el/")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/moe-theme.el/")
(require 'moe-theme)

It’s impossible to satisfy everyone with one fixed theme, but moe-theme provide some easy ways to customize itself.

There’s a full customization example:

;; If you want to use powerline, (require 'powerline) must be
;; before (require 'moe-theme).
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/PATH/TO/powerline/")
(require 'powerline)

;; Moe-theme
(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/PATH/TO/moe-theme/")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/PATH/TO/moe-theme/")
(require 'moe-theme)

;; Show highlighted buffer-id as decoration. (Default: nil)
(setq moe-theme-highlight-buffer-id t)

;; Resize titles (optional).
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-markdown '(1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.0 1.0))
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-org '(1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0))
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-rst '(1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.1 1.0))

;; Choose a color for modeline.(Default: blue)
(setq moe-theme-modeline-color 'cyan)

;; Finally, apply moe-theme now.
;; Choose what you like, (moe-light) or (moe-dark)
(moe-light)

If you have any question about settings, go on and read following README to get more detailed information first.

**** Note

*Notice that the file moe-theme.el is NOT a theme file, but it provide the ability for customization moe-dark-theme & moe-light-theme.*

So, if you just want to use load-theme to apply ONLY moe-theme itself and without customizations, you can skip “Customizations” chapter and just use this:

(add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/PATH/TO/moe-theme/")

(load-theme 'moe-dark t)
;;or
(load-theme 'moe-light t)
  

You may want to resize titles in markdown-mode, org-mode, or ReStructuredText-mode:

;; Resize titles
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-markdown '(2.0 1.7 1.5 1.3 1.0 1.0))
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-org '(2.2 1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0))
(setq moe-theme-resize-title-rst '(2.0 1.7 1.5 1.3 1.1 1.0))

Markdown should have 6 items; org has 9 items; rst has 6 items.

Make sure that these resizing settings should be placed before (moe-dark) or (moe-light).

The values should be lists. Larger the values, larger the fonts. If you don’t like this, just leave them nil, and all the titles will be the same size.

(setq moe-theme-modeline-color 'orange)
;; (Available colors: blue, orange, green ,magenta, yellow, purple, red, cyan, w/b.)

You can also use M-x moe-theme-modeline-select-color to change color interactively.

Or M-x moe-theme-modeline-random-color to have a good luck.

Now moe-theme supports Powerline. Run powerline-moe-theme if powerline installed.

(powerline-moe-theme)

If your terminal emulator doesn’t render 256-color output correctly, set its environment variable TERM to xterm-256color. For example:

• If you are using bash or zsh, add following line into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

  export TERM=xterm-256color
      

• Or if you are using Konsole, navigate to Edit Current Profile General > Environment > Edit and add the following line:

  TERM=xterm-256color
      

• If you’re using tmux and it cannot display in 256-color correctly, add this to ~/.tmux.conf, too:

  set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
      

I recommend set the value of show-paren-style to expression for better visual experience:

(show-paren-mode t)
(setq show-paren-style 'expression)

• If you add (moe-dark) or (moe-light) to your init file, the color of buffer-id would be incorrect after startuping CLI Emacs(but if you M-x moe-dark/light again, it would be corrected immediately). I don’t know why, but this issue doesn’t occur in GUI version Emacs. (Tested on GNU Emacs 24.3.90.1 2014-04-11)
• When using moe-light and typing characters under terminal emulator (e.g. Konsole) with IM (e.g. fcitx), the string embedded in Emacs may be very insignificant (But as you output the word from IM, it turns normal).

moe-theme.el (include images) is released under GPL v3.