Shobogenzo

Shobogenzo is a fantastic colorscheme for Vim that is a must-try for anyone who spends prolonged periods of time in front of their text editor. It boasts a medium contrast that is easy on the eyes, making it comfortable for extended use. The colorscheme was inspired by other low/medium contrast alternatives, but the developer noticed that none of them had colors that were easy on their eyes. So they set out to create a scheme that had good contrast to aid in syntax highlighting and not hurt one's eyes after a long day of editing.

For those who are not familiar with Vim, it is a text editor initially released for the Amiga computer in 1991 by Bram Moolenaar. It was designed as an extended version of the vi editor with additional features geared towards editing source code. Vim is cross-platform but is most popular on Unix-like operating systems. It is also free and open source software under a license that includes charityware clauses.

While Vim's interface is not based on menus or icons but rather commands given in a text user interface, its GUI mode, gVim, offers menus and toolbars for commonly used functions. Despite this, Vim's full functionality is still best expressed via command line mode. While Vim may initially be challenging for new users, it is highly efficient and productive once the basics are understood. To ease the process, Vim comes with a built-in tutorial for beginners and a Vim Users' Manual that covers basic and advanced features. The manual can be accessed online or read within the program.

Installation of Shobogenzo is a breeze; simply copy the file to $HOME/.vim/colors and within Vim, set the colorscheme to shobogenzo. If using a Gnome terminal, ensure that your profile's colors are set to xterm to get the most out of this colorscheme. Overall, Shobogenzo is highly recommended for anyone looking for a comfortable colorscheme to work with in Vim.