Solarized 8: True Colors

This is yet another Solarized theme for Vim. It places itself half way between the original Solarized and the Flattened variant. It removes only some of the bullshit. The color palette is exactly the same as in Solarized, of course, although some highlight groups are defined slightly differently (for instance, I have tried to avoid red on blue).

The main reason for the existence of this project is that the original Solarized theme does not define guifg and guibg in terminal Vim, making it unsuitable for versions of Vim supporting true-color terminals. Instead, this color scheme works out of the box if you use:

• Vim ≥7.4.1799 with termguicolors set, or
• NeoVim,

and a true-color enabled terminal (e.g., iTerm2). Solarized 8 also works in MacVim, gVim, etc…: no configuration is needed.

For terminals not supporting true colors, you have two possibilities:

1. set your terminal's 16 ANSI color to the Solarized palette, or
2. use an approximate palette based on xterm's 256 colors. To do so, put this in your vimrc:

   let g:solarized_use16 = 0
   

Installation

If your Vim supports packages (echo has('packages') prints 1), I strongly recommend that you use them. Just clone this repo inside pack/*/opt, e.g.:

git clone https://github.com/lifepillar/vim-solarized8.git \
 ~/.vim/pack/themes/opt/solarized8

Otherwise, use your favourite installation method.

There are actually 8 optimized color schemes:

• solarized8_dark and solarized8_light: the default Solarized theme;
• solarized8_dark_low and solarized8_light_low: low-contrast variant;
• solarized8_dark_high and solarized8_light_high: high-contrast variant;
• solarized8_dark_flat and solarized8_light_flat: “flat” variant (not present in the original Solarized, see screenshots above).

To use any of them, put a line like the following in your .vimrc:

colorscheme solarized8_dark

Note: if you use Vim packages, there is no need to packadd solarized8. Keep your runtimepath clean!

Options

The following options are inherited from Solarized:

• g:solarized_visibility: one of "normal" (default), "low", "high";
• g:solarized_diffmode: one of "normal" (default), "low", "high", "bold";
• g:solarized_termtrans: make terminal background transparent if set to 1 (default: 0).

The following options were not available in the original Solarized:

• g:solarized_statusline: one of "normal" (default) or "low";
• g:solarized_term_italics: set to 1 if your terminal supports italics (default is 0).
• g:solarized_old_cursor_style: set to 1 if you want to use the original Solarized's cursor style (default: 0). By default, the cursor is orange/red in light themes, and blue in dark themes (but please note that your terminal may override the cursor's color).

Besides, you may choose which terminal palette to use with g:solarized_use16, as mentioned above.

All these options may be used with any solarized8_* variant.

Troubleshooting

Hey, I do not get the right colors when running Vim inside tmux or in my favourite true-color enabled terminal!

Try putting this in your .vimrc:

let &t_8f = "\<Esc>[38;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"
let &t_8b = "\<Esc>[48;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"

See :h xterm-true-color for the details.

Tips

If you want to quickly toggle between dark and light background, you may define a mapping like the following:

nnoremap  <leader>B :<c-u>exe "colors" (g:colors_name =~# "dark"
    \ ? substitute(g:colors_name, 'dark', 'light', '')
    \ : substitute(g:colors_name, 'light', 'dark', '')
    \ )<cr>

To tune the contrast level you may use the following snippet:

fun! Solarized8Contrast(delta)
  let l:schemes = map(["_low", "_flat", "", "_high"], '"solarized8_".(&background).v:val')
  exe "colors" l:schemes[((a:delta+index(l:schemes, g:colors_name)) % 4 + 4) % 4]
endf

nmap <leader>- :<c-u>call Solarized8Contrast(-v:count1)<cr>
nmap <leader>+ :<c-u>call Solarized8Contrast(+v:count1)<cr>

Hacking

Do you want to hack the theme? Install the Colortemplate ftplugin, edit the *.colortemplate files, then rebuild the colorschemes using the script in the templates folder.

If you extend or improve Solarized8, please consider submitting a pull request!