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Set and Change Vim Color Schemes
Traducciones al EspañolEstamos traduciendo nuestros guías y tutoriales al Español. Es posible que usted esté viendo una traducción generada automáticamente. Estamos trabajando con traductores profesionales para verificar las traducciones de nuestro sitio web. Este proyecto es un trabajo en curso.
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.
This guide should also apply to NeoVim, a project based on Vim that adds many new features. However, it’s likely your NeoVim instance uses an init.vim
file instead of a .vimrc
for storing configurations. The init.vim
is typically stored at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
.
You can learn more about NeoVim and how to get started customizing it through our guide How to Install NeoVim and Plugins with Vim-plug .
Before You Begin
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.
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.
sudo
. If you’re not familiar with the sudo
command, see the Users and Groups
guide.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
1 2 3 4 5
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') Plug 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized' call plug#end()
After that, exit and reopen Vim, then issue the command:
:PlugInstall
Many Vim themes are designed to work with either GUI instances of Vim or particular color palettes in a terminal emulator. As such, the color scheme may appear irregular when you are not using one of these setups.
To remedy this, you can use the following command in Vim, which explicitly has Vim use a more limited color palette:
:set termguicolors
Alternatively, you can issue the opposite command to get the appropriate color palette when using a GUI or a supported palette in a terminal emulator. Typically, this is not necessary unless you previously set up Vim for a limited terminal palette:
: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 thehighlight
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
andgui
options used for properties like bold, italic, and underline.Red
provides a color value for thectermfg
key. The color value can either be a named value likeRed
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
1 2 3 4 5
" [...] 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.
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