I have been wondering for quite a while why Vim was so hard to read. Although I am by no way proficient at Vim, I do like it (yes, I tried nano, thanks but no thanks). I like my eyecandy so my terminal does pseudo-transparency, but even with a full black background the comments are still hard to read - they're in dark blue by default. Recently, with setting up the VPS and things, I do spend a lot of time in SSH sessions, and there's no geany in there. So I had decided for quite a while to go hunting for a nice vim colour scheme.

I had this site open in Firefox for weeks (I have the 'Read it later' extension but somehow I still manage to pile up tabs that I don't look at for days, don't ask why). So I went checking out how the themes looked, pulled one in, only to discover it didn't work as advertised. I dropped it into ~/.vim/colors/ like instructed, but no. I could load it, yes, but it stubbornly refused to give me the same colours as the online previews.

Now I always suspected there was something wrong with my terminal (I'm using Xfce's Terminal). I can set 16 colours manually in the configuration, but all those colour schemes often use way more than those. I found out my Terminal's $TERM setting was set to xterm, which was the culprit for the limited array of colours. So I set that to xterm-256color, and behold, the colour schemes match the online previews.

Today I bumped into the wombat colour scheme, designed by Lars H. Nielsen. It is a visually pleasiing scheme, easy on the eye, the colours aren't too sharp - and they are matching, even. Of course, all that is in the eye of the beholder. But I like it a lot.

Screenshots of how it looks:

• CSS
• Bash
• C

The only drawback is this makes you lose the pseudo transparency (I like to stare at my desktop), but that is the price of improved readability I guess ;-).