gruvbox-custom

The gruvbox vim colorscheme, optimized for loading speed

On my computer, the default gruvbox colorscheme takes 12.000ms to load when opening an empty buffer (nearly twice as long as loading all of $VIMRUNTIME, and longer than loading all other 20 plugins combined) while this version takes 0.825ms (slightly faster than vim-fugitive).

Note: I'm not using this exact colorscheme anymore. I used it as a base to make the simpler couleurs.vim that leverages tree-sitter highlighting.

How?

The main gain is achieved by having the vim colorscheme script be a list of "raw" :highlight commands instead of making function calls that dynamically build strings of highlight commands and :execute them. Further gains are made by moving filetype-specific highlights to ftplugins (although, see caveat below).

This is done by configuring the colors and highlights in a YAML template, and using it to compile optimized versions of colors/gruvbox-custom.vim and after/ftplugin/*.vim.

Caveats

There is no attempt at keeping any customizations: most of what I don't personally need has been removed.

• Only GUI colors are defined (so it only works with 'termguicolors')
• Only the high-contrast dark-background variant is defined
• No configuration for plugins and file types I don't personally use
• No customizations through g:gruvbox_* options
• A few deviations from the original theme (some taken from gruvbox-community's fork)
• Switching back-and-forth between colorschemes will break some highlights, since gruvbox-custom doesn't clear highlights before loading, and its filetype-specific highlights are defined in ftplugin.

It should be possible to support customizations by adding new attributes to the highlight records in the YAML template and modifying build/generate_colorscheme.py to emit different commands based on them wrapped in if-else blocks.

See also

couleurs.vim