Aurora

'Aurora' is my custom vim color scheme, modeled closely after the Solarized Dark color scheme. It was designed using Solarized Dark as a base starting point, but it diverges according to the following design principles:

• Compatibility/consistency between gvim and terminal vim.

  Solarized doesn't tend to work so well using xterm 256 colors, possibly because its color choice is so specialized. Initially, my custom color scheme (that would eventually turn into Aurora) was an attempt to mimic Solarized, but with the constraint of only using xterm colors. As much as possible, I've strived to keep the 24-bit gvim colors identical, or at least very similar, to the color choices used for the terminal color scheme.

• Emphasis on higher contrast color groupings.

  My biggest complaint with Solarized Dark is that, when editing code, the color choice makes various syntax elements blend together too much. The most notable example is the color of comments: a dark gray that makes them very easy to gloss over when scanning through code.

  Aurora, on the other hand, emphasizes contrast between major syntactical elements, e.g. comments, identifiers, and keywords. This makes it much easier to recognize and visually group together syntactical features while scanning through code.

• Harmonious color choices.

  While I do not profess to know much about formal color theory, I chose these particular colors in an attempt to keep them 'harmonious' with each other. By that, I mean that this color scheme is heavily centered around blue/green tones, accented by light grays and dark turquoises. There was no formal process or method to my selection; I simply hand-tweaked until I found the colors aesthetically pleasing and, to my eye, balanced.

Screenshots

For more, see the screenshots page on the wiki.

Installation

1. If you have Pathogen, then you can simply clone this repo into your ~/.vim/bundle:

    $ cd ~/.vim/bundle
    $ git clone https://github.com/henrybw/vim-colors-aurora
   

   (This process should theoretically also work for Vundle and other similar vim plugin managers.)

   If you don't use a plugin manager, then you can add the relevant file to your .vim/colors directory:

    $ mkdir -p ~/.vim/colors
    $ cd vim-colors-aurora/colors
    $ mv aurora.vim ~/.vim/colors/
   

2. Modify your .vimrc:

   Add the following lines to your ~/.vimrc file to enable Aurora:

     syntax on
     colorscheme aurora
   

   NOTE: To have the terminal colorscheme work properly, you may need to also add the following lines to your .vimrc:

     set t_ut=
     set t_Co=256
   

3. (Optional) Modify your terminal background:

   While Aurora will work fine on any dark colored background, take note that the terminal vim colorscheme will not set your background color for you. This is because the background color, based off of Solarized Dark's background color, is not in the standard xterm 256 color palette.

   The intended background color, as specified for the gvim colorscheme, is:

     #002b36 (R: 0/255, G: 43/255, B: 54/255)
   

   NOTE for OS X users: For some reason, MacVim makes this appear darker than it actually is. To make your terminal background match what MacVim renders, use the following color instead:

     #092029 (R: 9/255, G: 32/255, B: 41/255)
   

   This quirk does not seem to be present in the Linux version of gvim, from what I have observed.