PaperColor Theme

Note: The current document has not been updated for the current stage of the project. Some information apply only for version 0.7 and earlier.

Light & Dark color schemes for Vim terminal editor and gVim

Inspired by Google's Material Design

Improve code readability; great for presentation

Currently designed for these file types: C, C++, Java, Makefile, CMake, Lex/Flex & Yacc/Bison, Bash, VimL, Golang, JavaScript, JSON, HTML, XML, Python, Ruby, Markdown, DTrace, SystemTap, PlantUML, Haskell, Assembly (MIPS, GAS, NASM), SQL/MySQL, Octave/MATLAB, Fortran, R, Pascal, PHP, Perl, LUA, Clojure, Dockerfile, NGINX, Yaml, Dosini, Mail, reStructuredText, Erlang, Elixir, Cucumber

Other file types can still display well as long as your Vim is set up to recognize the language syntax even though that may not be the optimal experience. So, if the language you are working on isn't listed here, feel free to make a design request.

Plugin support: vimdiff, netrw, NERDTree, tagbar, tabline, vim-airline, vim-indent-guides, vim-startify

(see below for syntax-highlighting plugins target)

Installation

Place 'PaperColor.vim' file into 'colors' folder within your Vim directory, e.g. ~/.vim/colors/

Or simply use a plugin manager like Vundle (recommended for easy :PluginUpdate):

Plugin 'NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme'

Then, put this in your ~/.vimrc

set t_Co=256   " This is may or may not needed.

set background=light
colorscheme PaperColor

Or using the dark version:

set background=dark
colorscheme PaperColor

To switch to dark or light variant during session: :set background=dark or :set background=light

To quickly toggle between them, use vim-unimpaired's keymap cob

Optional: turn on line numbers and status bar

set number
set laststatus=2

Highlighting Customization

Some elements have default highlighting color that may not fit everyone, and you can customize their HEX color code in your .vimrc file. Refer to 256-color table when choosing color.

Example of currently available options:

let g:PaperColor_Dark_Override = { 'background' : '#1c1c1c', 'cursorline' : '#abcdef', 'matchparen' : '#3a3a3a', 'comment' : '#5f875f' }

let g:PaperColor_Light_Override = { 'background' : '#abcdef', 'cursorline' : '#dfdfff', 'matchparen' : '#d6d6d6' , 'comment' : '#8e908c' }

Syntax Highlighting Plugins Target

There are syntax highlighting enhancement plugins that improve upon Vim built-in syntax highlighting, and each can have many different implementations. This is the list of plugins that this color scheme targets.

C: c-syntax.vim
JavaScript: vim-javascript
JSON: vim-json
Go: vim-go
DTrace: dtrace-syntax-file
SystemTap: vim-systemtap
Haskell: haskell-vim
PlantUML: plantuml-syntax
Markdown: vim-markdown
Assembly MIPS: mips
Assembly GAS: vim-gas
Octave/MATLAB: vim-octave
Python: python-syntax
Dockerfile: dockerfile.vim
NGINX: nginx-vim-syntax
Elixir: vim-elixir

Screenshots

Note: The background of the dark color scheme was brightened a bit to reduce contrast after these following screenshots were taken.

To set vim-airline theme:

let g:airline_theme='papercolor'

To set lightline theme:

let g:lightline = { 'colorscheme': 'PaperColor' }

For more sceenshots, story behind the project, and other users' designs inspired by Paper Color, go to this blog post

Suggestions/Wishes/Questions/Comments are welcome via Github issues or via the blog above.

Related Projects Based On PaperColor

Material iTerm theme by Christoph Hermann

Material Terminator (terminal emulator) theme by Marco Herrero

Terminal Theme by Fixles

PaperColor Light for iTerm2 by ASeom Han

PaperColor Theme for Vis Editor by Jan Christoph Ebersbach

Airline PaperColor Theme for Emacs Powerline by Anthony DiGirolamo

Airline PaperColor Theme for Vim Lightline

Ninrod's vim + tmux + zsh dotfiles by Filipe Silva

PaperColor for Vscode by rozbo

PaperColor theme for Hyper by Rafael Rinaldi