Vim

• What is Vim?

• The Vim Philosophy

• First steps

• Minimal vimrc

• What kind of Vim am I running?

• Cheatsheets

• Buffers, windows, tabs

• Active, loaded, listed, named buffers

• Argument list

• Mappings

• Mapleader

• Registers

• Ranges

• Marks

• Completion

• Motions, operators, text objects

• Autocmds

• Changelist, jumplist

• Undo tree

• Quickfix and location lists

• Macros

• Colorschemes

• Folding

• Sessions

• Locality

• Getting help offline

• [Getting help offline (alternat…

Or quickly open a cheatsheet from within Vim: vim-cheat40.

Colorschemes are the way to style your Vim. Vim consists of many components and each of those can be customized with different colors for the foreground, background and a few other attributes like bold text etc. They can be set like this:

This would paint the background of the editor red. See :h :highlight for more information.

So, colorschemes are mostly collections of :highlight commands.

Actually, most colorschemes are really 2 colorschemes! The example above sets colors via ctermbg and guibg. The former definition (cterm*) will only be used if Vim was started in a terminal emulator, e.g. xterm. The latter (gui*) will be used in graphical environments like gvim or MacVim.

If you ever happen to use a colorscheme in terminal Vim and the colors don't look like the ones in the screenshot at all, chances are that the colorscheme only defines colors for the GUI. Conversely, if you use a graphical Vim (e.g. gvim or MacVim) and the colors look off, the colorscheme might onl…

Vim distributions are bundles of custom settings and plugins for Vim.

More advanced users know how to configure their editor anyway, so distributions are mostly targeted at beginners. If you think about that, it's quite paradoxical though: Making it easier by adding even more things to learn about?

I know that many people don't want to spend hours and hours on customizing an editor (and actually you never stop customizing your vimrc when you finally got hooked), but eventually you only get efficient in Vim when you take the time to learn it properly.

Repeat after me: "A programmer should know their tools."

Anyway, if you know what you're doing, you might draw some inspiration from looking at a few distributions: