--- title: "Color Schemes" url: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/vim-hates-you/color-schemes.md" canonical: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/vim-hates-you/color-schemes/" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Lesson 8 of 26 in Vim Hates You (Get Somewhat productive in an hour or so), 6:20. Free video by Roy Osherove." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Color Schemes 1. [Courses](https://courses.osherove.com/#courses) 2. [Vim Hates You](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/vim-hates-you/) 3. Get Somewhat productive in an hour or so Lesson 8 of 26 Duration: 6:20 [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng) ## In this lesson Roy cycles through Vim's built-in color schemes with the color scheme command and Tab, turns on wildmenu to see the options, and makes Zellner the default by adding it to the vimrc file. He points to the Vim Colors site and installs the El Rodeo scheme from GitHub: he creates .vim/colors with mkdir, runs git clone, moves the scheme's colors folder into it and sets the scheme in the vimrc. He also uses Shift-C to change text up to the end of the line. ## Transcript 800 words [\[00:07\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=7s) Vim comes bundled with a bunch of power schemes built in. So if I do a vim index html, this is the color scheme that I currently have, but I can change it by typing command colon and typing color scheme. And then I can cycle through different color schemes by pressing tab. So let's do a shift tab and go back one and say morning. This is for example the morning scheme and it kind of hurts my eyes. What others do I have? Let me set another option called wildmenu which gives me a more visual way to see the options I have when I tab through options. [\[00:44\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=44s) So if I do command set wildmenu and I set that to true basically by just setting set wildmenu I can now do a color scheme and tab through and you can see I can see the options and names. So let's do a Zellner because Zellner sounds awesome. Okay, so that's a Zellner. kind of reminds me of my old days and like an IBM PC XT or something. [\[01:15\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=75s) Kind of an old game. Anyway, so if we want to save this, all we have to do is by is edit our vimrc page and type here color scheme Zellner. You don't need to use any quotes here. So let's write quit and open Vim index. And this is the default scheme. Now, now if you wanted to install custom, schemes, there's, there's a bunch of them out there. [\[01:50\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=110s) There are basically thousands and hundred, definitely thousands of schemes out there. One scheme you can there's a great site called Vim Colors where you can kind of see what type and look for the scheme that you really like. if you want to install them. Usually it's as easy as doing a a git clone in a special folder. So, I'm going to show you how to do that. Let's say that we like Monokai. Okay. So, if we like this or let's say something kind of I don't know that looks kind of weird. [\[02:24\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=144s) Maybe El Dorado. El Rodeo. El Rodeo. Okay. El Rodeo. So if you want to do El Rodeo, we can view it here on GitHub or I can literally copy the link address and go back to my command line. So let me quit this and in my command line I'll go to my home folder cd home. [\[02:56\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=176s) And in my home, I'm going to create a special folder called Vim. mkdir .vim. And in I'm going to also create another directory called colors. mkdir .vim/colors. Now, this is where color schemes are usually saved. So, let me cd into vim. And all I have to do is do a git clone inside vim, not inside vim colors. and paste in the URL for this color scheme. [\[03:30\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=210s) And if we look at the what's going on right now, if I say tree, what you'll see is that there is a colors folder inside the El Rodeo color scheme. So, let me move that the folder colors here into my colors folder here. So, let's try to do that. Let's copy or actually move [\[04:06\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=246s) Move El Rodeo colors to my colors directory. So now if I look what's going on I have my colors directory undervim with the dovim and this is really what's important. Everything else can actually be removed. So I'm gonna remove RM minus RF El Rodeo because that's not needed. So all I have now is just the colors directory with El Rodeo. [\[04:38\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=278s) Let me copy the name here. And I'm going to change the color scheme by going oneup and changing my vimrc vim. vimrc. By the way, the viminfo just saves cache and late latest actions in Vim. So, it's kind of a Vim last actions file and macros and stuff. So, let me edit the vimrc and change the color scheme here. [\[05:09\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=309s) And here's a great way to change from the current word onwards. If you if I press shift C, I'm going to change and delete whatever I currently have up until the end of the line from the current location and be in insert mode. So I can basically do a shift C here and press commandV to say El Rodeo escape. Right quit. Now just to make sure you see this again, let me undo. [\[05:41\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=341s) I come here to this line and I say shift C and paste here. That way I can just very quickly do this surgical work. Right quit. Now let me go back to the city vim course chapter u vim vimrc and I'm going to say vim index.html. And you can see [\[06:11\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1H9Ijryng&t=371s) That El Rodeo is now the default. So that's how you can install different color schemes in Vim. [Previous lesson Understanding Vim Modes and Block Selection Magic](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/vim-hates-you/understanding-vim-modes-and-block-selection-magic/) [Next lesson Basic Search and Replace in a file](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/vim-hates-you/basic-search-and-replace-in-a-file/) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/