Color Schemes in Vim

So much has been written about vim that it’s hard to imagine that some topics have remained unlit. But no ... There is something written about very little. We fill the gap. I hope that this article will appeal to vimovodov and vimomanov.

This article will focus on color schemes. Vim supports syntax highlighting for a wide variety of files, ranging from all sorts of configs, and ending with programming languages ​​(including quite rare ones).
Quite a lot of color schemes have been created for vim (a rather large collection is here), but most of them, to put it mildly, greatly strain your eyes and amaze with their senseless diversity, and among relatively ergonomic topics with the right choice of colors, another problem often arises. This problem is that the authors use their color schemes with a small set of files.
Someone writes C code, its color schemes perfectly reflect the source texts, and when you try, for example, to edit html, strange colors appear or the text becomes invisible in some places. Another problem is that different plugins use different elements of the color scheme and sometimes quite annoying color collisions occur. So a rather successful ego scheme when installing the popular NERDTree and Tagbar plugins gives an annoying red and pink color in the headers.
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And this, by the way, is a rather old and neatly made scheme, often just the author cannot pre-check all the colors for all possible cases.
Manually editing color schemes is quite time-consuming - first you need to figure out which variable is used to encode the element. Then you need to find the right color and set its code in RGB format. After that, you need to set the color scheme for vim and see the result. There are several options for solving this problem.
First is the ColorSchemeEditor plugin. It requires building a vim with support for the python programming language and installing pygtk. For Linux OS, as a rule, python and pygtk are usually present on the installation dvd or are easily located in the repositories, as for the Windows XP / Vista / 9 family of OS, there are no problems in general - you just need to install the necessary one by taking installation packages from the developers' sites.
With this plugin you can change colors and see all the changes at once in the Vim window.
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Thus, the creation or correction of the color scheme becomes an interactive process.
With this plugin, I pretty easily fixed the annoying color flaws in the ego scheme and spent no more than a couple of minutes on it. I did not have to read the description of the syntax for setting colors, I just replaced the failed color and saved the circuit to a new file.
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Another way to create color schemes is through the VimTax web service . This is quite a graphical editor in the browser. The main drawback of this service is that it is impossible to upload your color schemes for editing. As a basis, you can take only standard schemes that are already stored on the site. But the process of creating a color scheme is quite obvious - you can select a design element, set a color and immediately see the result.
In general, the correct selection of compatible colors has long been implemented in the form of algorithms (an example of the operation of such algorithms is http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/ ). Therefore, if an artistic result is not needed, then a generator of colors compatible with each other can be a solution to the problem.
Sweyla's color theme generator-this is the very same “autopilot” that can randomly generate color schemes for vim (and not only, but also for emacs, etc.). You can play around a bit and choose one of the random themes. They may not be too original, but preservation of vision and a more or less readable look will be guaranteed.

Links to resources on vim color schemes


VimTax -A GUI to make your non-GUI editor all pretty and stuff.
http://www.vimtax.com/
Convenient editor of color schemes in the form of a web service.

Sweyla's Color Theme Generator
http://themes.sweyla.com/
Randomly generates color schemes.

Vim Color Scheme Test.
http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/
Large collection of topics and demo.

ColorSchemeEditor
http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/
Plug-in editor for color schemes (python + gtk)

And one more link not about vim, but to the color matching service.
http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/

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