colibri

A subtle colorscheme for Vim. You can preview the color palette here.

I've always appreciated color schemes, but felt that they often add more visual clutter than I needed (using more than a few colors distracts my eye and makes the file look more like a box of crayons).

I wanted a color scheme that would be minimal, look good at all times of the day, and work well with f.lux at night.

Colibri is a genus of hummingbird, which inspired the base colors for this scheme (long story short, I sampled these colors from a photograph of a hummingbird for a web UI project that I never ended up finishing).

Design rationale

1. Different colors should be used minimally as a way of visual cues. Use similar handpicked shades to introduce subtle contrast.
2. Regular text should complement the background; pure white or pure black overpower and should be used sparingly to draw attention.
3. Start minimal, tweak often, introduce colors as needed.

I use the complement green for constants to introduce some contrast, especially for elixir/ruby symbols (I think it could be a bit subtler, but that's the best complement green I found after 10-20 iterations).

I was using/working on this color scheme for a while from my dotfiles repository, you can see a fuller commit history here.

Installation

" vim-plug
Plug 'archseer/colibri.vim'
" NeoBundle
NeoBundle 'archseer/colibri.vim'
" Vundle
Plugin 'archseer/colibri.vim'

If you don't use a plugin manager just copy the content of vim/colors/ to ~/.vim/colors.

When you have the plugin installed, you can set it in your vimrc:

For 24 Bit Terminals

set termguicolors
set background=dark
colorscheme colibri

For GUI

set background=dark
colorscheme colibri

There is some support for a 256 color version, but the colors are much cruder. There is an experimental light version of the scheme, set background=light to test it out. Feel free to report your feedback at #2 .

Contributing

Contributors are welcome! There's still a lot of room for improvement, so any suggestions or patches are appreciated.

License

Logo: Hummingbird by Lane F. Kinkade from the Noun Project.

MIT © 2017 Blaž Hrastnik, see the license.