Posts tagged with "vim"

VIM colorschemes resource

Posted on Sunday, February 6, 2022

One thing that seems to be common to all users of text editors is their ongoing quest for the right color scheme. Whether it be a light or a dark scheme, low or high contrast, colorful or monochrome - everybody has a different taste. And some even change their color scheme depending on the time of the day.

So it comes to no surprise that there are countless colorschemes out there for all kinds of text editors. And my editor of choice, Vim, is no exception to that rule.

Though I have settled with my own colorscheme a while ago, I had used numerous others schemes before that. My favorite ones had been “fruity”, “manuscript” and the omni-present “solarized”.

For a long time the “scripts” section of vim.org had been my number one place to look for color schemes. But if somebody asks me today for the best resource to obtain them, I point them to vimcolorschemes.com.

vimcolorschemes.com is a GitHub project that has compiled a list of hundreds of colorschemes repositories for Vim. With previews, filter and search functionality, as well as GitHub’s “stars” it is much easier to get quickly to the scheme of your choice.

New VIM colorschemes

Posted on Saturday, June 27, 2020

Vim Icon Recently I created two new colorschemes for the VIM text editor. My main motivation was to have a light, readable colorscheme I could use for my coding sessions outside on the patio during the summer days and to have a similar dark one for use at night.

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Remap CAPS LOCK key to become ESCAPE in Ubuntu

Posted on Tuesday, June 23, 2015

This is just a quick tip on how to remap your CAPS LOCK key to ESCAPE. I use this setting for my Vim sessions in order to have comfortable access to ESCAPE while my fingers rest on the keyboard's home row.

There are several ways to remap keys in a desktop session. I use the command setxkbmap for this purpose (see man setxkbmap for more information).

The command

setxkbmap -option caps:escape

makes your CAPS LOCK key function as ESCAPE key. To turn the mapping off again just issue the command

setxkbmap -option

And in order to make the mapping permanent, run it as a session startup command which can be configured as follows:

Open a Terminal or press ALT+F2 and type gnome-session-properties
The "Startup Applications Preference" dialog opens, there, click "Add"
An empty "Add Startup Program" dialog opens
- In the "Name" field enter "Remap CAPSLOCK to ESCAPE"
- In the "Command" field enter setxkbmap -option caps:escape
Click "Add" and closed the dialog window.

If you use Vim a lot you will rapidly get used to this very comfortable setup.

Show nonprinting characters in Vim

Posted on Sunday, June 14, 2015

Vim Logo When editing tabular data or regular text, it is often quite handy to have a visual representation of nonprinting characters like EOL or TAB. To achieve this, Vim provides us with the listchars option, a feature that has gone unnoticed by me for a long time...

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