Truth, Computing and Fail

I’ve spent the past few weeks changing the look and feel of my Vim environment. One fine day I decided to explore some :colorscheme while I was on GVim apart from the classic ’slate’ that I always use.

Now, now. I can already see purists scoffing at me for using GVim. The main reason for me using GVim is just for the occasional visual treat. While you are on the terminal and working on Vim, you don’t really have much choice of beautifying things within the editor itself. You rather have to make some changes to the terminal profile about the background/font color, font to be used and all that stuff.

Coming back to where I started off, I googled and found a few color schemes. This caught my eye because it claimed to be The last vim color scheme you’ll ever need. Apparently this was supposed to give GVim a TextMate kinda look but applying the colorscheme is only the first step. You need to set the proper fonts and background too. I suggest you checkout the vimrc and gvimrc of the author of the linked post.

After all was done, I didn’t find the final outcome to be that impressive. In addition to GVim being buggy on occasions like no input displayed in the command mode, this time it would get stuck after I’d scroll down or up about 20 lines for like a second. Besides, it wasn’t looking too great. See for yourself.

Now it was time to make some changes to gnome-terminal and see if it suited my tastes. As usual none of set backgorund=dark and colorscheme ir_black showed the necessary changes within Vim. This part is easy. Just make a new terminal profile with the following options:

• White on black for foreground/background
• Font:Monaco with size 12

After this just add the following lines to your .vimrc

set background=dark
colorscheme ir_black


Switch to the new profile, open up Vim and see the difference in the richness of the colors and better font rendering.

Bonus Tip

If you are a python coder, you might want to look into this post by Samuel Huckins on making Vim a complete IDE for python development. I’ve been using the NERDTree and code folding plugins mentioned there and they have been of really great help.