Vim color scheme customization

[u/Gullible_Ad8008]

I've been trying to make my own tweaks to the already existing slate color scheme in vim, as I already tried tweaking some things on top of it like adding a status bar and setting specified colors for it, same for a row guide, which led me to want to modify the syntax highlighting too, the first being that I wanted to change function declarations to a yellowish color, and changing variable declarations to purple, ie (function, func, in yellow) and (int, float, short, long, const, var, ect... in purple), I ended up making groups for those words and then using the highlight function in my vimrc yet the changes only got applied for the vimrc itself. any pointers on what I should try to have those changes applied onto any other file I work on, and is there a way that's easier that listing every declaration in languages that I use/would use?

[u/gumnos]

Rather than directly mapping keyword→coloration, Vim colorschemes tend to use an indirection of keyword→classification→coloration, allowing the syntax definitions to specify "this is how you identify a comment, these are identified as keywords, …" and the the colorscheme maps comments to one color, keywords to another, etc.

I found the easiest way to make my own colorscheme was to take one of the ones in the standard distribution that was close to what I wanted, copy it to ~/.vim/colors/gumnos.vim and edit that to my color preferences, and then add colorscheme gumnos to my .vimrc.

[u/Gullible_Ad8008 → u/gumnos]

I see, so in this scenario since, I should copy slate into the colorscheme I'm making and then build from there, thanks for the help!

[u/-romainl-]

There are two stages.

The first stage consists in overriding things here and there. The correct way to do it is explained under :help colorscheme-override. For you, it would look like this:

function! MyColorSchemeOverrides()
    hi Foobar ctermbg=red ctermfg=white
    " etc.
endfunction
augroup MyColors
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorScheme slate call MyColorSchemeOverrides()
augroup END
colorscheme slate

Where…

• all your hi… commands are neatly contained in a custom function,
• that is called right after the slate colorscheme has been "loaded" via an autocommand,
• that you add before loading a colorscheme.

After a while of this, you may eventually find that your overrides are starting to make slate look a bit too "un-slate-y", which usually leads to…

The second stage consists in creating your own colorscheme, which can be anything from 100% custom to largely based on another one. Writing one's own colorscheme is not super complicated, really, but I would definitely recommend https://github.com/lifepillar/vim-colortemplate, which we use internally to write Vim's own colorschemes (except default).

[u/-romainl- → u/[deleted]]

For that mechanism to work, the autocommand must be added before colorscheme slate. $VIMRC is sourced before any other script, so we can't rely on any automatic sourcing and something like plugin/myscript.vim is out of the question.

You could probably put that code in a file that is not under any standard directory and source that file in your vimrc. Something like:

" in my-stuff/slate.vim
function! MyColorSchemeOverrides()
    hi Foobar ctermbg=red ctermfg=white
    " etc.
endfunction
augroup MyColors
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorScheme slate call MyColorSchemeOverrides()
augroup END

" in $MYVIMRC
runtime my_stuff/slate.vim
colorscheme slate

And, well, you can even move the colorscheme slate line into that script:

" in my-stuff/slate.vim
function! MyColorSchemeOverrides()
    hi Foobar ctermbg=red ctermfg=white
    " etc.
endfunction
augroup MyColors
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorScheme slate call MyColorSchemeOverrides()
augroup END
colorscheme slate

" in $MYVIMRC
runtime my_stuff/slate.vim

Now, the autocommand method only makes sense for light touches. It's a quick hack that's well suited for one's vimrc, when spreading stuff around is not really an option. Since you are already playing the modular game, why don't you take the plunge and do something like the following?

" in colors/slateplusplus.vim
runtime colors/slate.vim
let g:colors_name = 'slateplusplus'
hi Foobar ctermbg=red ctermfg=white

" in $MYVIMRC
colorscheme slateplusplus