I started with the evening colorscheme included in the distro, and tweaked a few colors to my liking. Then I decided to do a major overhaul and give the whole thing a desert evening sort of feel. I find it a very pleasing, easy-on-the-eyes theme. Screenshot: http://hans.fugal.net/vim/colors/desert.html Get the latest version at https://github.com/fugalh/desert.vim Put in ~/.vim/colors or (<your-vim-dir>\vimfiles\colors on Windows) and do :colorscheme desert I mostly don't maintain this anymore. Occasionally someone has a tweak suggestion - I recommend forking this and sending a pull request, or not.