Set and Change Vim Color Schemes

Vim reigns as one of the most widely used command line text editors. It offers a high degree of customization, runs on a wide range of operating systems, and comes pre-installed on many Unix-based systems.

You can learn more about Vim, including how to operate and navigate the editor, through our guide Getting Started Using Vi and Vim. Additionally, our guide Introduction to Vim Customization teaches you to configure and customize your Vim instance.

Color schemes are a useful component of Vim customization. They allow you to define how Vim displays both the background and text. Factor in Vim’s syntax highlighting, and the color scheme possibilities are vast. Not only can color schemes make your editor more appealing, they can make text easier to read and navigate.

In this tutorial, learn more about Vim color schemes. This includes reviewing existing color schemes, installing new ones, and even defining your own.

Before You Begin

1. If you have not already done so, create a Linode account and Compute Instance. See our Getting Started with Linode and Creating a Compute Instance guides.

2. Follow our Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance guide to update your system. You may also wish to set the timezone, configure your hostname, create a limited user account, and harden SSH access.

How to View Vim Color Schemes

Vim typically comes with several color schemes in addition to the default. These are a useful start, and may even provide everything you need for color scheme variety.

To begin, open Vim:

vim

You can see the currently assigned color scheme with the command:

:colorscheme

default

To see a list of available color schemes on your system, begin by typing the :colorscheme command. Then, without pressing Enter, follow the command with a Space and press the Ctrl+D key combination.

You should see a list similar to this one:

blue       delek      evening    morning    peachpuff  slate
darkblue   desert     industry   murphy     ron        torte
default    elflord    koehler    pablo      shine      zellner

The output above updates as you expand your collection of color schemes. Each time you run the command, Vim reflects your current set of color schemes.

How to Change Vim Color Schemes

The colorscheme command can also be used to change your current Vim color scheme. Just follow the command with the name of the scheme to be used. For instance, this command changes Vim to the evening scheme:

:colorscheme evening

You may also want to ensure that syntax highlighting is enabled. You can enable it with the command:

:syntax enable

After doing so, Vim applies particular colors from the color scheme based on the role each piece of text plays. In code for instance, this often means keywords, like def in Python and function in JavaScript, receive different colors than variable names.

How to Install New Vim Color Schemes

Vim has a long-standing and dedicated community that has produced many helpful plugins and tools. The link below for getting started with Vim customization gives you an introduction to these community tools.

The Vim community has also put together a vast array of pre-made color schemes. Many of these provide you with painstakingly crafted color palettes oriented around aesthetic appeal, readability, and/or reduced eye strain.

There are two main ways of adding community color schemes to your Vim instance. Both examples for these methods install Ethan Schoonover’s solarized color scheme.

Install Manually

This works by downloading the scheme’s file to a particular directory for Vim to access.

First, you need to create that directory if it does not already exist:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/colors

Next, download the scheme file, which you can usually find as a .vim file on the scheme’s GitHub page:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized/master/colors/solarized.vim -O ~/.vim/colors/solarized.vim

Install Using a Vim plug-in Manager

Our guide Introduction to Vim Customization covers how to get started with a plug-in manager and provides the installation process for Vim-plug. Essentially:

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Once you have a plug-in manager like Vim-plug installed, you can use the manager’s installation command to install a new color scheme.

Using Vim-plug you can install the solarized scheme by adding the following lines to your vimrc file. If you followed our guide Introduction to Vim Customization, you already have a .vimrc file which includes the first and last lines of this example. Otherwise, you can create one in Vim by opening a file at ~/.vimrc.

File: ~/.vimrc

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call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') Plug 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized' call plug#end()

After that, exit and reopen Vim, then issue the command:

:PlugInstall

:set termguicolors

:set notermguicolors

When done, reopen Vim and issue the :colorscheme solarized command. Your instance should update to the new scheme.

How to Manually Control Vim Colors

Vim color schemes actually consist of coloring rules applied to different Vim highlight groups. This means you can manually alter parts or all of your color scheme using the highlight command.

Here is an example of a highlight command that turns text Red for the Normal highlight group:

:highlight Normal ctermfg=Red

The following provides a breakdown of that command to help understand the syntax for highlight.

• :highlight begins the command for applying a highlight rule. Alternatively, you could use the shortened :hi form.

• Normal defines the highlight group to apply the rule to. To see a list of the default highlight groups in Vim, you can issue the command:

  :help highlight-groups

• ctermfg= indicates the component to be affected by the rule. This begins a key-value pair, and you can provide multiple key-value pairs per instance of the highlight command.

  There are four primary options for keys, two for terminal instances of Vim and two for GUI instances:

  • ctermfg affects the foreground color (i.e. text) for terminal instances.

  • ctermbg affects the background color for terminal instances.

  • guifg affects the foreground color for GUI instances.

  • guibg affects the background color for GUI instances.

  Additionally, there are cterm and gui options used for properties like bold, italic, and underline.

  • Red provides a color value for the ctermfg key. The color value can either be a named value like Red or a hexadecimal value such as #80a0ff.

The end result of the above command is that all text matching the Normal highlight group gets colored Red when using Vim in the terminal.

Using the highlight command, you can see a list of existing highlight rules. This shows each group and their assigned rules as key-value pairs.

:highlight

This option even shows examples of what each rule looks like when applied. Exploring this list can be a great way to start learning more about Vim colors schemes and how to craft your own.

How to Make the Vim Color Scheme Persistent

All of the color scheme changes shown above are transient, meaning when you exit your Vim session, the changes no longer apply. However, you can make your color scheme changes persistent by adding them to your .vimrc file. In fact, you can generally apply the same commands as discussed above. Just add these commands as lines in your .vimrc file without the preceding :.

Take this example. It adds three lines somewhere in the .vimrc. The first enables syntax highlighting. The second tells Vim to use dark backgrounds. And the third sets Vim’s color scheme to the solarized scheme installed above:

File: ~/.vimrc

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" [...] syntax on set background=dark colorscheme solarized " [...]

The solarized scheme actually has specific behavior when the background is dark, as do numerous other schemes created by the Vim community.

Should you create your own color scheme using highlight commands as discussed above, you can add the rules for the scheme directly to your .vimrc. The result is a persistent scheme that applies immediately when you load Vim.

Conclusion

This gives you everything you need to start the journey of custom Vim color schemes. You can begin making your Vim instance look sharper and clearer, in turn making your work easier and smoother. With all of the Vim customization techniques covered here, you’re well on your way to understanding Vim customization overall.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• phoenixNAP: How to Change and Use Vim Color Schemes
• Linux Hint: Vim Color Schemes
• Opensource.com: How to Change Colors and Themes in Vim
• GitHub: rafi/awesome-vim-colorschemes