vim/colorschemes: Request For Comments

Hello,

SUMMARY: All the remakes of the built-in color schemes we have been working on at  vim/colorschemes are ready to be tested/included into the Vim distribution. Feedback welcome.

We started the vim/colorschemes [1] project in May 2020 in the wake of two threads focusing on expanding the built-in color schemes roster [2][3].

The initial push for introducing popular color schemes was met with enthusiasm but it was pretty obvious a) that such a move couldn't happen overnight and b) that it would come with lots of challenges:

- many popular color schemes need documentation and hacks,

- many popular color schemes generate large amount of support request (linked to the previous point),

- many popular color schemes are pretty much unmaintained anyway so they don't support new features,

- each popular color scheme is written in a different way than the others,

- the two threads mentioned above were not the ideal place for that process,

- etc.

Additionally, adding more "modern" color schemes to the roster would only emphasize the problems exhibited by the old guard:

- they have been unmaintained for years/decades, which means that they don't support "recent" features,

- they are very inconsistent, both internally and between themselves,

- consequently, they have all been pretty much broken in one way or another for a long time, some of them being borderline unusable outside of a (possibly) very specific context.

Looking at the situation closely, it is quite clear that the whole thing required a rethinking. We created vim/colorschemes in the hope that it would help move the whole question of built-in color schemes forward, mainly along three axes:

- modernizing the existing built-in color schemes,

- adding new color schemes created by members of the community,

- providing better documentation and tooling to color scheme authors.

The project is still a work in progress, of course, but we are happy to announce that, thanks to the hard work of a small but motivated team, a first milestone is finally within reach: as of today, we (the vim/colorschemes team) consider the modernized versions of all the built-in colorschemes (except "default") to be in a shippable state and we would like the community to play with them and report any issue to the team.

As of now, all of the "remakes", as we call them, are usable in 0 colors, 16 colors, and 256 colors terminal emulators, as well as GUIs, with the usual caveats regarding terminal capabilities.

Of note:

- they are all identical in monochrome environments (&t_co == 0 for example),

- diff colors are the same for every color scheme,

- whenever possible, the colors are derived from the most high-definition source available,

- conversion from one color space to the other was done without software assistance,

- due to the _many_ inconsistencies plaguing the originals, we generally favored the _spirit_ to the _letter_ so the peachpuff remake (to really pick a random example) _is not the original peachpuff_; it still retains much of what made peachpuff peachpuff but in a much more usable and up-to-date package.

Or so we think, hence this request for comments.

If you want to participate in this effort, feel free to install vim/colorschemes alongside your other plugins and use our issue tracker [4] to report problems or suggest improvements. If that's not asking too much, we would also like to get some community input regarding the remaining topics:

- documentation,

- tooling,

- and how to select the new colorschemes.

Thank you, the vim/colorschemes team.

[1] https://github.com/vim/colorschemes

[2] https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1665

[3] https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/4996

[4] https://github.com/vim/colorschemes/issues

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