Zenburn

Fork of https://github.com/phha/zenburn.nvim, which in turn is a port of the venerable Zenburn colorscheme to lua. This fork tweaks some colors to make them more obvious, and adds support for more plugins (fugitive, bufferline, and updated indent-blankline), and somewhat simplifies the code.

Original is MIT license (see LICENSE.txt).

Installation

Install like any other plugin, e.g., with vim-plug:

Plug "daler/zenburn.nvim"

Or lazy.nvim:

require("lazy").setup({
    "daler/zenburn.nvim",
})

Setup

" vim
colorscheme zenburn

-- lua
vim.cmd("colorscheme zenburn")

To set the theme in lualine:

require("lualine").setup {
    options = {
        theme = "zenburn",
    }
}

Modifying

Here is the sequence of loaded files:

• colors/zenburn.lua is the entrypoint from nvim's point of view. It loads...
• lua/zenburn/init.lua which in turn loads...
• lua/zenburn/highlights/init.lua which in turn loads...
• lua/zenburn/highlights/*.lua, each of which loads...
• lua/zenburn/palette.lua which defines the colors.

To change the colors themselves, edit lua/zenburn/palette.lua. This includes entries for all highlight groups under :help highlight-groups and :help group-name.

All other files should refer to these colors.

Using local changes

If using lazy.nvim to load plugins, you can load from a local directory with the dir argument, like this:

require("lazy").setup({
    { dir="location/on/disk/zenburn.nvim" },
})

Restarting nvim will reload lazy.nvim which should trigger a reload of the colorscheme reflecting your local changes.

Workflow

If you don't like how a particular file type is being highlighted, you may want to mess with the treesitter highlight group configuration.

To do this, put the cursor on the text you want to change. Run :Inspect to get a readout of what highlight group is under the cursor. Check for that highlight group in in lua/zenburn/palette.lua (which contains the nvim built-in highlight groups); if it's there you can change the color directly. Otherwise, look for it in lua/zenburn/highlights/treesitter.lua, and if it's not there, then add the highlight group here.

For example, when writing this very markdown file, if I run :Inspect on some normal text I see - @spell.markdown links to @spell markdown. That @ typically means it's a treesitter highlight group. Sure enough, I don't see anything relevant in lua/zenburn/palette.lua which only has built-in highlight groups. There's similarly nothing noted in lua/zenburn/highlights/treesitter.lua. But imagine for some reason I wanted bright red text everywhere, then I could add this to that latter file:

return {
 -- ... lots of other config here...
 [ "@spell.markdown" ] = { fg = "#ff0000" },
}

If I set up lazy.nvim to load from a local directory where I've made this change (as described above), then restarting nvim will give bright red text everywhere that treesitter parsed the markdown as "@spell" highlight group.

Other hints

• To inspect the colors for that highlight group, use :Telescope highlights.

• When modifying colors, the nvim-colorizer plugin is helpful with the :ColorizerToggle command, which highlights hex color codes in their respective colors.