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:
1. GRB256
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: Gary Bernhardt
2. Guardian
Guardian is originally created for XHTML and CSS editing, however you can use it for Ruby and JavaScript development as well.
Download: Vim.org
Author: M. L. (anderskorte)
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.
Download: astonj
Author: AstonJ
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: Kim Silkebækken
5. GitHub
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.
Download: Vim.org
Author: Anthony Carapetis
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: nanotech
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: Ryan Bates
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.
Download: Vim.org
Author: Henning Hasemann
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: Tim Pope
10. Candy
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.
Download: Vim.org
Author: Tiza
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.
Download: GitHub
Author: Ethan Schoonover
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.