Vim Color Schemes for 256-color xterms
======================================

This is a project to provide good-quality Vim color schemes for those of
us who work in a terminal. Many good color schemes are available for the
GUI version of Vim, but few of them offer adequate color terminal
support. This project modifies over 100 color schemes to also support
256-color terminals using colors as similar as possible to the GUI
colors.

Most of the color schemes here come from the Color Sampler Pack:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=625

How do I use it?
----------------
You can download the source and build it yourself by running the script
named 'build' if you are on a Unix-like system with Python and X
installed (the X colors database is used to resolve color names).  I
also plan on providing a pre-built package that will be preferable for
most users. Check the Downloads section. Color scheme files are usually
placed in $VIM/colors, where $VIM is your personal Vim directory (~/.vim
on Unix-like systems). The Vim documentation has full details.

Please note that these color schemes will not generally look good on
lower-color terminals. You should probably use something like this in
your vimrc file:

if &t_Co == 256 || has('gui_running')
    colorscheme desert256   " Or some other high-color scheme
else
    colorscheme desert      " Or some other low-color scheme
endif

To test color representations on your terminal, try running 'termcolors'
found in the 'scripts' directory.

How does it work?
-----------------
The script gui2xterm automatically adds color xterm support to a color
scheme file, but this only works reliably if steps are taken to prepare
the color scheme first. To do that, there are patches for most of the
color schemes in the 'patches' directory. In some cases these patches
also fix bug in the original color schemes. Please read README.patches
for details.

For a small number of color schemes, gui2xterm can't do anything useful.
Since color schemes are simply Vim scripts, they can arrive at their
final result in arbitrary ways that gui2xterm can't recognize. Some of
these color schemes are converted by a patch without running gui2xterm.
Others are not converted or included in the results.

For color schemes that are converted with gui2xterm, there is often a
need to override resulting colors to make the color scheme look better.
This is done with hand-picked options to gui2xterm which are customized
for each color scheme in the 'build' script.

How good are the results?
-------------------------
The quality of the results varies. Some color schemes look almost
identical to the GUI version. A few look really bad. Most are close
enough to be very usable.

The really bad color schemes are generally ones that prominently use
dark, non-gray colors. The colors that are available using the xterm
color-mapping scheme just don't include dark reds, greens, etc. For
example, in HTML-style hex-code colors, the darkest red available is
#5f0000. There's no easy way to work around this.