How to write a VIM color scheme?

Question

I have been looking around for VIM color schemes and found some great ones out there (esp. by using http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/), but I always want to change a few aspects of each one I find. So I've decided now that what I really want to do is make my own, or be able to customize the ones I find on the fly. Basically, what I want to know is:

1) How do I write a vim color scheme -- are there any good (quick) tutorials?

2) How do I add language-specific customizations? Like say for Python, I might be interested in having different colors for classes and methods (is this even possible? What level of customization is possible?). Anything you can tell me about how to customize for specific languages would be fantastic! (esp. python, but also others like C, Java, Ruby would be great)

3) Are there are good, complete (ideally well-commented) templates that I could start from which contain all aspects of a color scheme, like background, text, language specific stuff, and the like?

Solution 1

I didn't watch the "Creating colorschemes for Vim" episode of VIMcasts, but the others are really good.

Solution 2

Vivify lets you interactively create vim colorschemes with color pickers and previews your scheme using several code samples.

Solution 3

colorschemes are actually vim scripts. You use the hi command for coloring, which works like hi TextType guifg=#hexforegroundcolor guibg=#hexbgcolor gui=bold/italic/underlined/undercurled (assumed you use gvim). If you type :hionly, you get a complete list of text types with their current highlighting
see also http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#:colorscheme

Solution 4

May be you can find this colorscheme template useful: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=106

The original description is

"The philosophy here is to provide a ready-to-uncomment list of highlight commands for all the important groups. Then you can deviate from the default until you come up with one you like."

Solution 5

Launch vim, say ":help syntax", it has quick start etc.

For the complete templates look at your installation:

colorschemes are in /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors/

languages syntax in /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/syntax/

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