10 vim color schemes you need to own - Vim plugins, tips, tricks and tutorials
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Aug 26th, 2012
There are a lot of Vim color schemes out there. It’s always hard to find the perfect one.
People often use different color schemes depending on what they are working on.
This is pretty neat approach that has plenty of supporters. That’s why we did a quick overview of our top 10 themes. Let’s go:
GRB256 is a color scheme based on ir_black by Gary Bernhardt. It feels really
nice especially for Ruby on Rails development, so give it a try.
2. Guardian
Guardian is originally created for XHTML and CSS editing, however you can use it for
Ruby and JavaScript development as well.
3. Codeschool
The author created this color scheme to mimic the CodeSchool theme used in their Rails Best
Practises course. It is ported to Vim using Coloration.
4. Distinguished
Distinguished is a dark Vim color scheme for 256-color terminals. It’s often used in the
terminal Vim. It’s perfect for JavaScript development. Works great for
Ruby and Python too.
This color scheme is a port of GitHub’s light-background syntax highlighting theme.
It looks good with completion menus, diffsplit, STL highlighting and more.
6. Jellybeans
Jellybeans is a colorful color scheme, inspired by ir_black and twilight.
It’s designed primarily for gVim/MacVim, but also includes support for 256 color terminals.
7. Railscasts
Ryan Bates ported his TextMate color scheme used in the RailsCasts episodes to Vim.
If you write Ruby code most of the time, you should definitely try it.
8. Twilight
Twilight is a clone of TextMate’s twilight scheme. There are a lot of Twilight clones
out there, but it seems this is the most preferred. It’s not exactly the same as the original,
but in some cases it feels even better. If you are coming from TextMate, we encourage you to
give it a try.
9. Vividchalk
This color scheme is another theme ported from TextMate to Vim. It is based on the Vibrant Ink theme TextMate.
GUI, 256, 88, and even 16 color terminals are supported.
Candy is one of the hidden color schemes in the Vim world that you can’t find easily.
Feel free to download it and use it right away.
Bonus: Solarized
You almost thought it won’t be included, didn’t you? Solarized is probably the most
popular color scheme out there. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should download and
start using it immediately.
As you can easily guess we prefer dark color schemes. However, if you know
amazing light theme that deserve to be included just send us a link
and it will be featured in the list.
What’s your favourite color scheme? Do you prefer different color schemes for
terminal Vim and MacVim/gVim? Let us know.
About the author
is a software consultant focused on testing, code quality and building awesome products. He is helping companies to ship their products with confidence and style.
If you are passionate about JavaScript, Node.js, TDD, building and growing applications, you should visit his blog at
Copyright & 2014 - Vim Ninjas - your ultimate source for vim plugins, tips, tricks and tutorials.Vim Colorscheme Gallery
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Developed with:
Added new color scheme: Gruvbox, Tomorrow and Tomorrow Night. Thanks for your recommendation!
Improved a detail dialog UI. Now showing &supporting 256-colors& flag.
Do you know another cool color scheme?
Please tell me!The basics
Vim’s syntax items are organized into named groups: Normal, Constant,
Function, and so on. Every language that vim supports has a syntax file that
defines how the language tokens are mapped to those groups. This can be a very
complicated task involving tons of regular expressions and it won’t be
discussed here. This article tackles the much simpler problem of defining the
mapping from group to actual color.
A colorcheme is a file, containing such mappings. These need to be located in
vim’s runtime, under a “colors” directory. Activating a scheme is done by
executing:
colorscheme scheme_name " or, a bit shorter:
colo scheme_name
The actual mappings are created by using the highlight command, or hi for
short. As an example, this is how you’d set all Normal text to be white on a
black background in the GUI:
hi Normal guifg=White guibg=Black
As you can see, the first argument is the syntax group and the rest are
key=value modifiers. Different ones are used for GUI and terminal colors. It
goes like this:
ctermfg, ctermbg: These have effect on color terminals. On 8-color
ones, you have access to several names like “blue”, “red”, and so on. You
can also use the numbers from 0-15, where the upper half are “bright”
versions of the original eight. These days, it’s normal to use a 256-color
terminal emulator, so you could probably utilize the whole 0-255 range.
I’ll talk about a plugin that helps with that later on. If you frequently
find yourself without a running X server, you might want to consider
limiting your choice to the base eight colors. Take a look
for more details on those.
guifg, guibg: These values have an effect only in the gui (gvim or
mvim), and you can set them with color names or with hex values (#rrggbb).
Generally, I’d recommend sticking to the hex codes. You can express more
colors with them, and there are some nice plugins that could highlight that
format, but more on that later.
The modifiers ending in “fg” set the foreground, the ones with “bg” are for the
background. You can reset the color to its default value by setting it to
NONE. If you want to specify additional properties, like making the text bold
or italic, you can use gui= and cterm=. For instance, to make searches
yellow, bold and underlined in the terminal:
hi Search ctermfg=Yellow ctermbg=NONE cterm=bold,underline
It looks a bit like this:
Another important variation of the highlight command is highlight link. It
sets a syntax group’s colors to be the same as another one’s. This is used for
almost all language-specific syntax items. For instance, the rubyFunction
syntax group links to the Function one.
hi def link rubyFunction Function
The def part stands for “default” and it means that the link will only take
effect if this syntax group hasn’t been specified before. That way, if you want
to override it, you can do that in one of your own vimscripts.
The process
So, now that we know the basic commands, where do we begin?
While you could start from scratch, there’s a lot of syntax to work with, so
it’s highly recommended to grab some other colorscheme and hack on that. Your
modified file needs to be located under a “colors” directory in the vim
runtime, for example, ~/.vim/colors. Unless you have some specific
requirements, it needs to start with some boilerplate. First, we set the
background:
set background=dark
This can also be “light” and it’s useful as a baseline. It affects the default
colors that come with vim, so if you leave some of them as they are, they will
change depending on its value. Some colorschemes try to adapt to it, but it’s
simplest to just set it to one value and code according to that.
if exists("syntax_on")
syntax reset
This cleans up the current highlighting and syntax changes. It ensures that
when you change to this colorscheme, you start with a clean slate.
let g:colors_name = 'colorscheme_name'
This line sets the name of the colorscheme, and it’s important for it to match
the filename. The above example should be in a file called
“colorscheme_name.vim”.
After this, it’s time to start defining the actual syntax groups. A full list
of all of them can be found with
You can also execute highlight without an argument to see a full dump of all
the colors set at the moment. Here are few of the more common ones:
Normal: The most common group of all. You probably want to keep it
simple with this one, using some variation of white and black.
Comment: Should be self-explanatory.
Constant: This one is actually not for constants, defined within the
language, but for things like strings and numbers. There are specific
groups that usually link to it, String, Number, Boolean, and so on,
so you can color those in something more specific, if you’d like for them
to stand out.
Operator: Braces, mathematical operators, commas. Which ones have this
highlighting actually depends on the filetype, some prefer to use Special
for punctuation.
Statement: Usually control flow statements, but this depends on the
filetype as well. In vim, the built-in commands are highlighted with this
After you’ve decided on colors on a few of these, the rest can be linked to
them with highlight link, so you don’t have to copy-paste the definitions.
Remember that you can execute highlight commands directly in the command
line, which will let you experiment with the colors before you write them to
the file. If you change your mind, just set the colorcheme again, which will
clear your tweaks. You can also execute :source with the filename, which
might be more convenient if you have a mapping for it.
When you’re looking at code, it might not be immediately obvious which tokens
map to which groups. Fortunately, vim has a few functions that help you
discover the syntax properties of the text. Unfortunately, they’re a bit
confusing. You can investigate them in detail
but I suggest you try out the
plugin instead. After placing it in autoload, you just need to execute call
SyntaxAttr#SyntaxAttr(). This will display information about the syntax
directly under the cursor. Once you know what group a token belongs to, it’s
easy to modify it.
Another interesting plugin that helps in the console is
It has a single command, XtermColorTable, that displays all of the current
terminal’s colors in a split window. They’re annotated with the terminal’s
color codes, 0-255, and also with hexcode equivalents, which could be very
helpful if you’re trying to be GUI-compatible.
And as for the hexcodes, the
plugin highlights them all in the colors they represent. Since that format is
only compatible with the GUI, it’s probably best to use it there, but it works
fairly well in the terminal as a sort of a guideline.
Other interesting highlight groups
The SyntaxAttr plugin is great for most syntax groups, but there are a lot of
areas that you can’t put the cursor on. Here are a few you might be interested
CursorLine: I don’t usually use a
but it helps a bit in the NERDTree. I like it unobtrusive, so I just make
it underlined with NONE for the background.
DiffText, DiffAdd, DiffChange, DiffDelete: These control the colors
when using vim’s diffing capabilities. The
colorscheme, for example, makes removed items red and added ones green.
Pmenu, PmenuSbar, PmenuThumb, PmenuSel: Coloring the popup menu
might seem like a small tweak, but having a bright pink one with white text
can be highly annoying. It’s actually the reason I started learning how
to customize my colors.
Visual: This one is for highlighting the visual selection. I’d recommend
aiming for good contrast with a bright background color.
Search: If the default look of search matches looks unsightly to you, you
could tweak this as I showed above. Note that this also affects the
currently active line in the quickfix window.
StatusLine, StatusLineNC, VertSplit: These groups handle the looks of
the window separator lines. I’ve always disliked how “fat” the windows
borders look in vim. That’s why I set a white foreground on a NONE
background and tweaked my
to stl:-,stlnc:-,vert:│
I’ve been very happy with the result, although I would have liked it a lot
more if I could set a horizontal line character to the statusline filler.
Apparently, vim doesn’t let you put multibyte characters there…
Folded and FoldColumn: The second one only matters if
but the first one would be important if you use folding at all. You
should be careful not to make folded text too similar to status lines, or
you might get confused when you work with splits.
WildMenu: If you’ve turned on the
option, you might benefit from tweaking this one. It controls the color
of the active item in the menu. Since I don’t have a background for the
statusline anyway, I just set the font to something bright and obvious.
Looks like this:
MatchParen: This is not one of vim’s core defaults, but it ships with the
matchit plugin that comes with vim. You can customize what the matching
brace looks like by tweaking this group.
So, why not do it all with XML or something?
Many other editors are designed with the assumption that these color mappings
are just data. That makes a lot of sense and is simple enough to implement. You
can set the colors in XML or YAML files and let the editor parse them and
provide a nice GUI with color pickers and preview panes. The benefit of Vim’s
approach is that it gives you a lot of freedom, without sacrificing too much.
Sure, the syntax is a bit frightening at first, but if you look at it at a high
level, it’s just another key-value store. Except it’s actually a part of the
scripting language, so you can put variables, expressions, whatever you need.
A very nice example is .
It’s a well thought-out set of colors for many different applications. The vim
colorscheme is interesting, because it goes to great lengths to be
customizable. You can set a few variables that control the contrast and
sharpness levels and you can switch between a light and a dark variant.
A vim “theme” is called a “colorscheme” and is just a bunch of vimscript.
The highlight command is the main one you need to remember.
You can set colors for the GUI or for the terminal, vim can’t automatically transform the values from one to the other.
All the syntax groups can be seen with a
A few plugins that help are
As is usually the case with Vim, the colorscheme system is a bit odd at
first, but flexible and fairly comfortable to work with once you get used
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