Vim Color Schemes

FWIW, modern reworks of the built-in colorschemes are on their way [1]. We plan to add more third-party colorschemes in the future as we streamline the creation and validation process.

[1] https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/9795

I'm a huge fan of the base16 color schemes - not for their appearance (though most look great), but for their ease of integration within the shell and vim. Just clone the repos below, drop a few lines in your shellrc/vimrc, then use a single bash command to change the scheme in both. No more mucking with Xresources.

https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-shell

https://github.com/chriskempson/base16-vim

After playing around with color schemes for over a decade and never really being satisfied, I made my own palette that is pretty close to the ANSI color scheme, just with more attractive shades that I copied from things like subway systems and public safety stuff (fire trucks and school busses) since so much research goes into colors being clear and unmistakable in varying conditions of weather or cleanliness. Highlight colors are incremental shades of grey. This has worked remarkably well with 99.9% of default app color schemes. Haven't touched my colors in years now.

Edit:

screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ZPWjSKk, since terminal.sexy URL sharing wasn't working so well for me. I'd post a desktop screenshot, but I'm on the road and my laptop's WiFi just stopped working, lol.

Some background: cyan is now safety orange. This is because cyan hurts my eyes on a light background and it can be tricky to distinguish from blue, while orange is pretty easy to distinguish from red. IIRC I picked out the shades of blue and magenta myself because most color design documents I could dig up had blue and purple usage paired with a specific background color (usually white) which didn't carry over very well to a dark background. I find these shades to be distinguishable and flexible enough for just about any background color.

The greyscale highlights are generally for tmux and nvim status line background colors, which I use to distinguish cells instead of seperator glyphs.

  [colors]

  foreground = #383838
  foreground_bold = #383838
  cursor = #383837
  background = #aaaaaa

  #black (is black)
  color0 = #000000

  #red (fire engine red)
  color1 = #ce2029

  #green (London underground green)
  color2 = #007d32

  #yellow (school bus yellow)
  color3 = #ffd800

  #blue (Persian blue)
  color4 = #1c39bb

  #magenta (Rebecca purple)
  color5 = #663399

  #cyan (actually "ANSI Z535 safety orange", for my eyes)
  color6 = #ff7900

  #white (from the color white)
  color7 = #ffffff

  ###Highlights###
  # Evenly-spaced increments of the greyscale
  # Makes for good tmux/nvim statuslines
  color8 = #1b1b1b
  color9 = #383838
  color10 = #545454
  color11 = #717171
  color12 = #8d8d8d
  color13 = #aaaaaa
  color14 = #c6c6c6
  color15 = #e3e3e3

Over recent years I've been drawn to the cross-tool themes like Nord and Dracula.

https://www.nordtheme.com/

https://draculatheme.com/

Having consistency between neovim, fzf, bat, tmux, tig and fish is lovely.

I tried very hard to find a satisfying light-themed color scheme for Vim, but I have not had much success so far. Most of them have a grey or white base that I don't care about; I wanted something more pastel or warmer and found solarized to be a bit too intense. I wrote and now use my own colorscheme [0] but I think there is much room for improvement.

[0] https://i.redd.it/psmi7s4gcfy51.png

A favorite of mine is still the Shoji theme[1] though sadly this site ignores background coloring so it just only shows black on white[2]

[1] https://github.com/haystackandroid/shoji

[2] https://vimcolorschemes.com/haystackandroid/shoji

I discovered a "color-scheme paradox": Every color scheme I enjoy using avoids using color red for anything except error messages -- which seems to be objectively a good thing -- yet such color schemes are rarely the most popular ones, which I attribute to the fact that the preview screenshots that do not use the color red look unappealing.

I wish there was a universal 'colorscheme' standard that every text editor (Vim/Emacs/VSCode/Jetbrains/otherIDEs) all plugged into. And you could 'load/save' your settings across different apps etc... each one saving into the same _standardized_ file format. Then a site like this would work with me just 'ctrl-c'/ ctrl-v'ing the colorscheme into _any_ text editor (heck any program) target.

(Narrator: They colonized mars before this happened)

I've been using `Apprentice` theme

https://github.com/romainl/Apprentice

Has been a great experience so far

My first thought was that this is some kind of delayed april fool, since all color schemes looked the same (b/w) to me, until I realised that I have to turn-on javascript.

I love most of them!

Is there a way to search for non low-contrast themes? My search for "High contrast" among the light themes yielded no results, yet i saw some themes that fit the bill while browsing.

I went gruvbox some years ago and now cannot live without it. I’m using a base16 variant of it.