This is a template to create Vim colorschemes. It includes the most common options used for a filetype independent colorscheme for a terminal Vim with 256 colors.
Every option is set to default values, to create your colorscheme you should select a background, give the colorscheme a name and fill in the necesary options.
Maestro Entheon's colortest Perl file is included with this template. You'll
likely want to call it like perl colortest -w -r -s and it will print out
every color your terminal supports. It's helps a lot when developing
colorschemes.
Every highlight group includes the following (obvious, already known) format:
hi (Group) ctermfg=none ctermbg=none cterm=none
Where:
- Group. The targeted highlight group. If you want to know what's exactly
supposed to do,
:help highlightor:help hl-(Group) - ctermfg. The color of the letter of the syntax group.
- ctermbg. The color of the background of each letter in the syntax group.
- cterm. Formatting options. For a list of options, check
highlight-argsin:help :highlight
Every other colorscheme I came across came with most of the options, but without a real order. It seems that someone did an original template with those options, published it and then everybody else copied it. Being an order-paranoid, I decided to tidy it up a bit.
- Editor settings. Configuration regarding Vim's interface, not related to a
given programming language.
- Number column. The column with the line numbers and folds
- Window/Tab delmiters. The area that shows window splits and opened tabs.
- File Navigation / Searching.
- Prompt/Status.
- Visual aid. Matching parenthesis, visual block selection...
- Variable types. Boolean variables, numbers, strings...
- Language constructs. Conditionals, cycles, keywords, comments...
- C-Like. The syntax of some languages is very C-like. This section is for them.
- Diff. Colors for vim diff, block is equal, block is different, block doesn't exists...
- Completion Menu. Insert mode completion menu, background, scrollbar, selected item, non-selected item.
- Spelling. Useful if you use spelling checking with Vim.
There's a section labeled Specific settings. If you want to use specific colors for a given filetype, the highlight rules can be added here to keep them in order.