PaperColor Theme

Light & Dark color schemes for Vim terminal editor and gVim

Inspired by Google's Material Design

Improve code readability; great for presentation

Currently designed for these file types: C, C++, Java, Makefile, CMake, Lex/Flex & Yacc/Bison, Bash, VimL, Golang, JavaScript, JSON, HTML, XML, Python, Ruby, Markdown, DTrace, SystemTap, PlantUML, Haskell, Assembly (MIPS, GAS, NASM), SQL/MySQL, Octave/MATLAB, Fortran, R, Pascal, PHP, Perl, LUA, Clojure, Dockerfile, NGINX, Yaml, Dosini, Mail, reStructuredText, Erlang, Elixir, Cucumber

Other file types can still display well as long as your Vim is set up to recognize the language syntax even though that may not be the optimal experience. So, if the language you are working on isn't listed here, feel free to make a design request.

Plugin support: vimdiff, netrw, NERDTree, tagbar, tabline, vim-airline, vim-indent-guides, vim-startify

(see below for syntax-highlighting plugins target)

Installation

Place 'PaperColor.vim' file into 'colors' folder within your Vim directory, e.g. ~/.vim/colors/

Or simply use a plugin manager like Vundle (recommended for easy :PluginUpdate):

Plugin 'NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme'

Then, put this in your ~/.vimrc

set t_Co=256   " This is may or may not needed.

set background=light
colorscheme PaperColor

Or using the dark version:

set background=dark
colorscheme PaperColor

To switch to dark or light variant during session: :set background=dark or :set background=light

To quickly toggle between them, use vim-unimpaired's keymap cob

Optional: turn on line numbers and status bar

set number
set laststatus=2

User-config Options

This theme currently provides theme options and language-specific options. All config options can be stored in global variable g:PaperColor_Theme_Options which can be set in your .vimrc

Theme Options

Within section theme, options for each theme can be specified under the theme name. The original PaperColor theme is default. For example:

let g:PaperColor_Theme_Options = {
  \   'theme': {
  \     'default': {
  \       'transparent_background': 1
  \     }
  \   }
  \ }

Or if you want to specify options only for a variant (dark or light) of a theme, you can specify using this pattern [theme name].light or [theme name].dark. For example:

let g:PaperColor_Theme_Options = {
  \   'theme': {
  \     'default.dark': {
  \       'transparent_background': 1
  \     }
  \   }
  \ }

Note: if the same option is provided in both a theme and a theme's variant, the value in the theme's variant options will take precedence.

Currently available theme options

transparent_background set to 1 to use terminal background. Default is 0, use theme background

Language-specific options

In general, for each language, built-in functions and constants are not highlighted. This is intentional; the vim syntax file often lags behind actual language development. To override the default behavior, optionally place a language section in g:PaperColor_Theme_Options. An example configuration is available below, and will be updated as new languages are supported.

let g:PaperColor_Theme_Options = {
  \   'language': {
  \     'python': {
  \       'highlight_builtins' : 1
  \     },
  \     'cpp': {
  \       'highlight_standard_library': 1
  \     },
  \     'c': {
  \       'highlight_builtins' : 1
  \     }
  \   }
  \ }

Syntax Highlighting Plugins Target

There are syntax highlighting enhancement plugins that improve upon Vim built-in syntax highlighting, and each can have many different implementations. This is the list of plugins that this color scheme targets.

• C: c-syntax.vim
• JavaScript: vim-javascript
• JSON: vim-json
• Go: vim-go
• DTrace: dtrace-syntax-file
• SystemTap: vim-systemtap
• Haskell: haskell-vim
• PlantUML: plantuml-syntax
• Markdown: vim-markdown
• Assembly MIPS: mips
• Assembly GAS: vim-gas
• Octave/MATLAB: vim-octave
• Python: python-syntax
• Dockerfile: dockerfile.vim
• NGINX: nginx-vim-syntax
• Elixir: vim-elixir

Screenshots

Note: The background of the dark color scheme was brightened a bit to reduce contrast after these following screenshots were taken.

To set vim-airline theme:

let g:airline_theme='papercolor'

To set lightline theme:

let g:lightline = { 'colorscheme': 'PaperColor' }

For more sceenshots, story behind the project, and other users' designs inspired by Paper Color, go to this blog post

Suggestions/Wishes/Questions/Comments are welcome via Github issues or via the blog above.

Related Projects Based On PaperColor

Material iTerm theme by Christoph Hermann

Material Terminator (terminal emulator) theme by Marco Herrero

Terminal Theme by Fixles

PaperColor Light for iTerm2 by ASeom Han

PaperColor Theme for Vis Editor by Jan Christoph Ebersbach

Airline PaperColor Theme for Emacs Powerline by Anthony DiGirolamo

Airline PaperColor Theme for Vim Lightline

Ninrod's vim + tmux + zsh dotfiles by Filipe Silva

PaperColor for Vscode by rozbo

PaperColor theme for Hyper by Rafael Rinaldi

Feel free to add related projects here!