Lichen is configured to handle 256 color terminals. Many of the colorschemes that can be found online are actually designed for gViM, which is the GUI implementation of ViM. Lichen will provide a similar syntax highlighting experience as gViM but inside a terminal. It also has most of the relevant keywords for configuring any new/old colorscheme, so it provides as a good template for a new 256-terminal colorscheme.
Lichen was modified from a colorscheme called moss, which partially worked in the terminal. Lichen provides a dark colorscheme with blues, greens, and browns designed to minimize distraction and eyestrain from brightness while maximizing utility by providing quick distinct color shorthands. Reds and oranges are resolved for searching, error handling, and errors.
Lichen has been tested with nearly every programming language/format including TeX (LaTeX), Python, Fortran, Fortran 90, C, C++, vimscript, PERL, bash, csh, yaml, json, html, xml, md (markdown), MATLAB, sed, and even binary. The vimrc found in http://github.com/hellabyte/myconfig is recommended to get syntax highlighting working for all the above filetypes (i.e. for Fortran 90 the Hellabyte vimrc will correctly provide free-format syntax highlighting).
Lichen has been tested on a variety of platforms, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, CentOS, Redhat, and Mac OS X. It has also been tested successfully in a variety of terminals including Terminal.app, iTerm2.app, Gnome Terminal, Terminator, xterm, and rxvt-unicode (urxvt). The most important setting is that the environment variable `TERM' is set to 256 colors (although 88 colors works too).
To install, use your favorite plugin manager or just use cp after
cloning--just make sure that lichen.vim ends up in the
correct directory: $HOME/.vim/colors.
(C) 2014 - 12 - 23 -- Nathaniel Hellabyte