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 (and better, in my opinion).

The reason for the existence of this project is that the original Solarized theme does not define guifg and guibg in terminal Vim, which means that gui colors cannot be used with versions of Vim supporting true-color terminals.

This colorscheme works out of the box if you use:

• NeoVim with true-color support enabled, or
• Vim 7.4.1799 or later with termguicolors on,

and a true-color enabled terminal (e.g., iTerm). It also works in MacVim and other GUI versions, of course.

For terminals not supporting true colors, the requirement is the same as for the other colorschemes: your terminal ASCII colors must be set to the Solarized palette. The ugly degraded 256-color variant has been removed.

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 colorschemes:

• 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).

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_dark. Keep your runtimepath clean!

Configuration

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";

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).

These options may be used with any solarized8_* variant.

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>

If you want to tweak the colors yourself, edit src/solarized8.vim, then :source it to recreate the colorschemes.