How to Install a Vim Theme

Vim is a powerful text editor, a favorite among software developers. As you become more comfortable and experienced, you’ll want to start designing your Vim experience. You can do a lot in vim to increase your productivity. Today, you’ll learn about customizing the visual experience of Vim.

Vim has a large user base. Many of them have created a Vim theme (or color scheme as it’s called in Vim terminology) in that are free to use. So you’ve surfed the web, and you found some vim color schemes that you like. You might be wondering – How do you install it? The steps to install a Vim color scheme are as follows:

1. In your home directory, create a directory named .vim/colors if it doesn’t
   exists already
2. Download your theme (and extract it if in a .zip file or tarball)
3. Copy the file {color scheme}.vim into ~/.vim/colors
4. In your ~/.vimrc file, add the  following lines

   set background=dark
   
   " Turns on syntax highlighting.
   syntax on
   
   " Current Theme
   colorscheme {color scheme}
   
   

The next time you open Vim, you’ll see the content within your new color scheme.