Screenshots

light

dark

ZenGarden is a color scheme for vim/neovim that tries to be calm and relaxing, while still retaining some important properties from color theory (contrast, uniform lightness).

It is ... uh ... "heavily influenced" by gruvbox, by which I mean I took the gruvbox files & simply replaced gruvbox with zengarden and changed the colors. Anything that is fancy or clever in this colorscheme is 100% morhetz's work, not mine.

The colors are designed primarily with the light color scheme in mind (contrast), but the dark version also works (with lighter shades of accents).

Palette

Design

⚠️ I am a software developer (backend, to boot!), not a designer, and it seriously shows in this color scheme :P

Since I have 0 creative talent, I attempted to approach the color scheme design scientifically, by finding out what objective measures are available. Spoiler: I did not find a lot of data.

During my "research" (= searching around in the web), I found a couple of suggestions that informed me on how to design this color scheme:

The general consensus seems to be that light background is easier on the eye
Some posts/discussions indicated that blue light might be harmful for prolonged exposure, for various reasons (one being that it changes the sleep rhythm, and another one that short wave lengths possibly penetrate deeper into the eye).
High contrast - a no-brainer at last! - is important for relaxed reading.

(Note to self: I should prolly come up with references to back up those claims)

So here's the plan I came up with:

For color selection, use CIE-LCh instead of RGB or HSV, because it emphasizes perceptual uniformity. This means that - at least in theory - two colors with the same value for "lightness" will be perceived as ... well ... similar in lightness, independent of their hues.
Use only accent colors that have high contrast (I used Colour Contrast Tool). Generally, I aimed for a contrast around 70, more for colors on the blue end of the spectrum.
For blue-ish colors (blue, cyan, also magenta), reduce lightness a bit more. I did this primarily because the colors appealed more to me subjectively.
For lighter/darker colors, the only thing I changed was to increase/decrease the "lightness" value by 10.

Mode

To specify light or dark mode edit your .vimrc (or nvim's init.vim).