21 Best Vim Themes For elegant development in Vim – Dunebook

Vim is a free and open source text editor that works like any other text editor, for example, Notepad++ and Sublime.

To run Vim, one needs to use either the command line interface (CLI) or else a graphical user interface, which is GUI.

When we use the word themes, it’s basically Vim color schemes, which allows you to combine colors to create an attractive aesthetic when you use them. These best vim color schemes are ready to use.

Here in this article, we will talk about the 21 best Vim themes you can choose from.

1. Gruvbox The

Gruvbox

theme is available in both light and dark versions. The theme is designed as a bright pastel retro groove and seems to be heavily inspired by solarized, bad wolf and jelly beans.

The main goal when developing Gruvbox is to keep colors easily distinguishable, contrast enough and still be pleasing to the eyes

.

Pros

• Gruvbox is available in dark and light colors, and the reddish background makes it look consistent when you switch between the two colors

.

• The theme offers multiple contrast settings. There are three variants available, each with different contrasts.
• Gruvbox can be customized in detail. You can customize tab sizes, contrast color schemes, file type icons, an indent in the sidebar, and more.

• Cons There is no list of supported editors

2. Molokai

Molokai is a Vim port of the monokai theme for TextMate. The theme was created by Wimer Hazenberg.

By default, it has a dark gray background,

and 256-color terminals are also supported

.

However, only the dark gray background style is supported by the vim terminal at this time.

Pros

• Molokai theme looks great
• It has a strong contrast
• One of the most downloaded themes for an IDE
• The theme is easy to install with Vundle

Cons

• No cons as of now

3. Dark Solarized

Solarized Dark is created by Ethan Schoonover. This theme is available in both light and dark mode. It is a palette of sixteen colors, eight accent colors and eight monotones.

Solarized Dark has several unique properties and is designed with precise CIELAB luminosity ratios and a refined set of shades based on fixed color wheel ratios

.

The theme has been tested extensively on color calibrated displays and a variety of lighting conditions.

Pros

The

• color scheme has been designed with great background knowledge
• There are ready-to-use packages for Vim, IntelliJ, iTerm, and Emacs
• Works well with multiple sources

Cons

• Some of the versions may not work, such as Vanilla
• The theme is not useful for night use
• It has a very low contrast against the background, which makes it difficult to read

.

4. Half Light

The

half-light color scheme is a clean, vibrant, modern and pleasing light/dark color scheme for Sublime Text, (Neo) Vim, iTerm and more.

It offers consistent colors and

cterms, plus matching themes for plugins like vim-airline, lightline, or NERDTree. OneHalf Light provides harmonious colors and styles for all UI elements and syntax groups.

Pros

• Half light is available in light

and dark

• color schemes The theme supports a variety of terminals and editors that offer a consistent color theme

Cons

• None found

5. Dracula

Dracula is a dark theme for Vim, Emacs, Brackets, Atom, Alfred, Notepad++, iTerm, TextMate, Gedit, LightPaper and more.

Pros

The colors

• used are comfortable on the eyes and do not stand out Colors are
• separated correctly so text is always clear
• It is well designed
• Available for tons of terminals, editors and more Cons

• Dark contrast could be the eyes

6. Base16 Family

The Base16 family is an architecture for creating themes based on carefully chosen syntax highlighting using a sixteen-color base. The Base16 family provides a set of guidelines on how to style syntax and how to code a generator to compile base-16 schemas and templates.

Pros

The Base16 family

• has many color schemes
• The support team of the Base16 family is outstanding
• It is a dark scheme solarized and compatible with htop

Cons

• Only offers 16 colors
• Each theme needs manual adjustments

7. Zenburn

Zenburn is a low-contrast color scheme for Vim. It’s pleasing to the eye and designed to keep one in the area for long programming sessions.

This color scheme has been ported to many different editors and environments

.

Pros

• Zenburn has a light blue color, which is not harmful to the eyes.
• Low contrast reduces eye strain
• The theme is colorblind

Cons

• Some may find that the contrast is too low

8. vim-atom-dark

The colors of the vim-atom-dark theme are inspired by the excellent One Dark syntax theme for the Atom text editor.

Pros

• Vim-atom-dark color scheme is easy at the eyes

Cons

• None found

9. PaperColor Theme Light

papercolor-theme light is a light and dark color scheme for terminal and graphic Vim stunning editor. The theme is inspired by Google’s Material Design and has improved the readability of the code and is ideal for making presentations.

Pros

• Papercolor theme light has a clean and readable look
• Supports true color/GUI color and identical 236 colors

Cons

• None found

10.

Tender

Tender is a dark and cool 24-bit color scheme for Vim, Airline, and Lightline. This theme is generated by Style.

Pros

• Tender is suitable for long coding sessions
• Looks great with nvim and lightline

Cons

• The theme does not go well with older versions of vim

11.

Badwolf

Badwolf is a color scheme for Vim created by Steve Losh. It is a high-contrast color scheme with dark background that makes it ideal for coding.

Pros

A high-contrast color scheme for Vim Easy-to-use

cons

• Scope of improvement in HTML

12. Nord-Vim Nord-Vim is

an arctic, bluish north, clean and elegant

color scheme

for Vim.

It is designed for Vim terminal and GUI mode with true colors and support for many third-party syntax and UI plugins, such as packaged themes for lightline, vim and vim-airline

.

Pros

• Unified design of syntax elements of the user interface and editor provides a clutter-free appearance
• Supports a wide range of programming languages

Cons

• None found

13. Jellybeans.vim

Jellybeans.vim is a colorful and dark color scheme inspired by ir_black and twilight. The theme is primarily designed for graphical Vim but supports various color terminals such as 24-bit, 256, 88, 16, and 8.

The Jellybeans.vim color scheme is created by Nano Tech.

Pros

• Very versatile, both on dark and light background

• Cons None found

14. hyper-elegant Hyper-snazzy

is a sleek color scheme with bright colors and was created by Sindre Sorhus.

Pros

• Faded colors are available to distract elements, for example, braces and punctuation marks Colors are
• consistent

Cons

• Some may find the contrast hard in the eye

15. VIM-ONE

vim-one is an adaptation of light and dark color schemes for Vim and was created by Ramzi Akremi. It supports true colors and is one of the best Atom color schemes that is now for Vim and NeoVim.

Pros

• Looks polished
• Clone of Atom theme

Cons

• None found

16. Oceanic-Next Oceanic-Next is a neovim theme

inspired by Oceanic Next for Sublime

.

It is not a direct port, but it uses some colors of the sublime theme that adjust to work with neovim and vim8

.

The dark-blue color theme

is classic and quite relaxing

.

Pros

• A classic

theme

• Looks great and is not the eyes

Cons

• Some people may find the theme difficult to work with

17. Ayu-Luz

ayu-light is a simple, bright and elegant theme for modern Vim. It is available in both dark and light formats.

The lightweight format of ayu-light is exceptionally pleasing and has bright and distinctive colors. This simple theme allows you to work for long hours.

• Easy Pros for the eyes

The

• theme allows you to work for long hours

Cons

• The white background makes the color stand out

18. Solarized

light

In the solarized dark version, we already shared that the theme is also available in light version

.

The color palette has a nice feel and was created by Ethan Schoonover. Solarized light is one of the most popular vim themes and is available for terminal emulators and code editors.

• Pros The theme has been

very well created

• Multiple versions available
• Works great with different sources

• Cons The contrast is low

19.

Inkpot

Inkpot is a dark color scheme for VIM created by Ciaran McCreesh. It works well in the GUI and on about 88 color terminals and 256 color terminals.

The theme

has been downloaded more than 30,000 times

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Pros

• Dark theme looks great

Cons

• The contrast might be too harsh for a few 20 people

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Purify

Purify is a clean and vibrant color scheme for Vim created by Kyoz. This color scheme is compatible with almost all languages.

Pros

• The theme is very simple and beautiful
• It’s clean and vibrant
• Supports almost all languages

Cons:

• None found

21. Pale night

Palenight is a relaxing color scheme for Neovim/Vim. This track is based on Material Pale Night. The beautiful yellow, purple, and orange color makes it look more vivid. Drew Tempelmeyer is the creator of Palenight

Pros

Colors

• are vivid Easy
• to install

• Cons Bright colors may appear in the pop-up window

What is the best vim color scheme?

The best Vim color scheme is subjective and depends on personal preference. However, based on popularity and user ratings

, some of the top-rated Vim color schemes include:

1. Solarized
2. Dark Gruvbox
3. Molokai
4. OneHalf Light
5. Dracula
6. Base16
7. Zenburn
8. Nord-Vim

Family

These color schemes are highly rated by Vim users for their clear and readable syntax highlighting, visually appealing color schemes, and compatibility with different environments and terminals. Ultimately, the best color scheme for you will depend on your personal taste and the type of work you do at Vim.

How to install

Vim themes Installing a Vim theme can be

done in a few simple steps

:

1. Download the theme: Most Vim themes can be downloaded from popular Vim script repositories such as Vim Awesome or GitHub. The theme must be in the form of a Vim script file with a “.vim” extension.

Place the theme in the “colors” directory: Create a “colors” directory in your Vim

2. configuration directory (usually located in “~/.vim/colors” or “$HOME/vimfiles/colors” in Windows) and copy the downloaded Vim script file into this directory.

Add a color scheme command in your Vim configuration file:

3. Open your Vim configuration file (usually located in “~/.vimrc” or “$HOME/_vimrc” in Windows) and add the following line to specify

the theme you want to use: color scheme theme_name

Replace “theme_name” with the name of the theme you want to use. For example, if you are using the Solarized Dark theme, you can use the solarized

Restart Vim color scheme or the configuration file source:

1. To apply the changes, restart Vim or the configuration file by typing the following command in Normal mode: :source

$MYVIMRC Once you

have completed these steps, the new Vim theme should be applied the next time you start Vim. If you want to switch to a different theme later, simply repeat the steps and specify a different theme in your Vim configuration file.

Conclusion

Depending on the user’s taste, you can choose to go with the dark or light color vim themes

.

All the themes we have mentioned here are popular, and you can choose any of them or several of them and keep changing vim themes from time to time.