Choosing VIM Color Scheme

captsolo.net

3 points·CaptSolo··5 comments

I suppose it's a preference by some, but I've always found it perfectly fine to just run "vim" in a terminal. It seems to me that an editor doesn't need to provide features that a terminal already has: I can set the terminal colors any way I want, or have buffers open in multiple windows or tabs, etc. And when the terminal handles this, I have the same power and flexibility over any program, not just the editor.

I see your point and often use vim w/o customized color scheme (but might pick a custom color scheme for MacVim's fullscreen mode to resemble WriteRoom).

However, editor color schemas allow for finer customization. For example, to specify colors for code-highlighting: keywords, statements, strings, ...

Terminal itself would not know anything about these things.

I agree that it's useful if there is a way to customize a program's "markup". Once the markup is there, though, anything can display it.

For instance, in an xterm-color or linux terminal, you could type something like ":colo darkblue", and you'd still see custom colors. This is using vim's color path (e.g. "/usr/share/vim/vim72/colors", "~/.vim/colors").

But the colors are there because the text includes things like "make this bold", or "make that green". And in a terminal, I might have customizations for this markup that apply to everything, which can be nice. For instance, maybe I make all bold text red, and that holds in everything from editors to man pages. It's convenient to not have to make these settings in every program that I run.

What is people's experience on choosing colors that are easier on the eyes? Any preferences or suggestions?

I switch between "desert" and "vibrantink" depending on how much contrast my eyes can handle at the moment :)

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