colorific.vim

Vim theme (dark and light) built to produce readable diffs, unlike the default theme, and clear syntax highlighting that doesn't use overly bright colors that make your eyes bleed after prolonged use.

The theme comes with two color sets for 256-color (cterm) and truecolor terminals. 16-color ones are unsupported, and the theme will not work with them. To use truecolor (e.g., #ABC123) support, make sure that you have set termguicolors in your vimrc.

Syntax highlighting uses material colors manually tweaked to lower the saturation and brightness. Why material colors? Because when you try to find good highlighting colors out of all the colors available, it helps to have a starting point.

The theme comes in three light and dark UI variants that correspond to some prominent GTK themes:

• light and dark use blue-grey primary colors to match those used in the Adapta GTK theme.
• light2 and dark2 use white and black for starker contrast, similar to the Plata and Materia GTK themes.
• light3 and dark3 use the off-blue and greyish colors from the Arc GTK theme. Contrast between colors is too low for good cterm support, so make sure truecolor support is enabled.

Note that colorific will not override the system background color, so pick the variant that looks best with your system theme.

Another point worth noting is that this theme overrides some of the Vim syntax highlighter defaults for various languages so that coloration appears more consistent across them.

Installation

To install, clone the repository and run ./install. This will install the Vim themes along with all the extras.

To install a specific component instead of everything, pass any of the following flags:

./install usage:
  -a|--alacritty   install alacritty files
  -g|--gitk        install gitk files
  -k|--kitty       install kitty files
  -n|--neovim      install neovim files
  -t|--tmux        install tmux files
  -v|--vim         install vim files
  -h|--help        print this message

To uninstall, use ./uninstall. The same program-specific flags in the installation script apply here.

Configuration

Vim / Neovim

For Vim, edit your .vimrc file to contain:

let g:colorific_style='<style>'
colo colorific
set background=<bg>
syntax on

• <style> is the name of the theme to load. Possible values are light, light2, light3, dark, dark2, dark3.

• <bg> refers to the background color of your terminal or system theme. Set it to light for a light background and darkfor a dark one.

For Neovim, edit the .config/nvim/init.vim file instead.

Note: If Vim is invoked as root or via the EDITOR environmental variable by a program running as root (e.g. visudo), you may need to install colorific to the root Vim directory. To do so, run ./install while root and edit the /root/.vimrc (or /root/.config/nvim/init.vim) as described above.

Airline

Colorific can also be used to color the airline bar. Load the theme by adding to your vimrc (for Vim) or init.vim (for Neovim):

let g:airline_theme='colorific'

Note For root, edit /root/.vimrc or /root/.config/nvim/init.vim as applicable.

Examples

	Light	Dark
CSS
HTML
XML
Ruby
Python
C/C++
R
Julia
Perl
Javascript
Bash
LaTeX

Extras

alacritty

Running the install script (either ./install or ./install -a will copy the YAML theme file in alacritty/ to ~/.config/alacritty.

To enable a theme, edit your alacritty config file to include:

import:
 - ~/.config/alacritty/colorific.yml

To load a particular theme, edit the ~/.config/alacritty/colorific.yml file and change the value of colors at the bottom to the desired variant (e.g. *dark2, *light2, etc.)

gitk

The gitk stylings are installed by running ./install or running ./install -g. This only copies all the gitk-* variants in the git/ directory of this repository to ~/.config/git/.

To actually load a theme, copy/rename/move one of these installed variants to ~/.config/git/gitk. The file name must be 'gitk.'

kitty

The installation script (run either ./install or ./install -k) copies the kitty themes in kitty/ to a directory called ~/.config/kitty/themes.

To enable a particular theme, edit the kitty.conf file to have:

include ./themes/<theme>.conf

where <theme> corresponds to one of the available variants (e.g. dark2, light2, etc.).

tmux

Themes for tmux are available in the tmux/ directory. They are installed to the ~/.tmux directory when running ./install or ./install -t. To use them, edit the ~/.tmux.conf file to have the line:

source-file <path>/<to>/<theme>.tmuxtheme

where <theme> refers to one of the available variants (light3, dark3, light2, dark2, dark, or light).