Vim Paper Color Theme

I started using Linux and Vim last Summer, and one of the first things I did in Vim, like I would do in any code editor, was to find a decent color scheme. I was surprised by how useful and colorful the terminal could be. Coming from Windows background, I realized how much I missed out. At first I was happy with the themes I found, but as I worked with less mainstream languages, most of the themes don’t work well enough. Or, some work on these languages but not on the others, so I had to switch theme based on the language I was programming, and it quickly became annoying. So, I decided to create my own color scheme.

https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme

Assembly: MIPS, GAS, NASM | Plus xxd generated hexdump for fun :)

(More screenshots at bottom)

I design this light color scheme for terminal Vim and gVim, and I call it Paper Color. It is inspired by Google’s Material Design. It is designed to be visually appealing, playful, bold, and high contrast yet pleasant for the eye.

The goal is of course to improve readability, but I also focus on presentation ability. That is the main reason I chose to design a light color scheme instead of dark. I like dark color schemes, but for practical purposes, light ones work better in more places. For instance, when doing code walk-through with a screen projector in a presentation, it is very very unlikely that the projector can project the background of a dark theme to be dark enough to make the code stand out like on the monitor screen, thus resulting in muddy syntax colors that reduces the code readability of the audience. Of all presentations that I have been to, the light color schemes always perform better.

I create this color scheme based on the famous Tomorrow theme because I find its code to be better organized than other themes that I have tried, which make it easy to learn and modify. More importantly, unlike many themes, it already displays well on both terminal and GUI Vim, so it makes sense for me to simply work from there.

Right now, It is specifically designed for 20+ languages. Visit the Github page to see the list of syntax highlighting plugins that this color scheme supports.

https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme

Installation

With Vundle plugin manager

Plugin 'NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme'

Or manually

$ git clone https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme
$ cp papercolor-theme/colors/PaperColor.vim ~/.vim/colors/

Then, put this in your ~/.vimrc

Light version:

colorscheme PaperColor

Dark version:

colorscheme PaperColor-Dark

I hope you like it :) Any comment/suggestion/question is welcome.

Here are the screenshots for different languages.  I will update them occasionally. In the meantime, check out post updates and users’ creations inspired by this below the screenshot gallery.

Ruby

MySQL

Go

DTrace

SystemTap

JavaScript

C/C++

C

Fortran

Ruby

Assembly: MIPS, GAS, NASM | Plus xxd generated hexdump for fun :)

Java

R

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Update May 31, 2015: Bringing PaperColor theme support to Vim-airline.

let g:airline_theme='papercolor'

See what others have done based on Paper COlor design

Christoph Hermann designs a very good looking iTerm2 theme called material-iterm that has both light and dark variants.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Reddit user fixles creates a Terminal theme that matches Paper Color very nicely, and it looks beautiful when you use tmux.

Let me know what you have created with this design  :)

See more discussion about this post on Reddit!