This is a template to create Vim colorschemes. It includes the most common options used for a filetype independent colorscheme for a terminal Vim with 256 colors.

Every option is set to default values, to create your colorscheme you should select a background, give the colorscheme a name and fill in the necesary options.

Maestro Entheon's colortest Perl file is included with this template. You'll likely want to call it like perl colortest -w -r -s and it will print out every color your terminal supports. It's helps a lot when developing colorschemes.

Every highlight group includes the following (obvious, already known) format:

hi (Group)          ctermfg=none    ctermbg=none    cterm=none

Where:

• Group. The targeted highlight group. If you want to know what's exactly supposed to do, :help highlight or :help hl-(Group)
• ctermfg. The color of the letter of the syntax group.
• ctermbg. The color of the background of each letter in the syntax group.
• cterm. Formatting options. For a list of options, check highlight-args in :help :highlight

Every other colorscheme I came across came with most of the options, but without a real order. It seems that someone did an original template with those options, published it and then everybody else copied it. Being an order-paranoid, I decided to tidy it up a bit.

• Editor settings. Configuration regarding Vim's interface, not related to a given programming language.
  • Number column. The column with the line numbers and folds
  • Window/Tab delmiters. The area that shows window splits and opened tabs.
  • File Navigation / Searching.
  • Prompt/Status.
  • Visual aid. Matching parenthesis, visual block selection...
• Variable types. Boolean variables, numbers, strings...
• Language constructs. Conditionals, cycles, keywords, comments...
  • C-Like. The syntax of some languages is very C-like. This section is for them.
• Diff. Colors for vim diff, block is equal, block is different, block doesn't exists...
• Completion Menu. Insert mode completion menu, background, scrollbar, selected item, non-selected item.
• Spelling. Useful if you use spelling checking with Vim.

There's a section labeled Specific settings. If you want to use specific colors for a given filetype, the highlight rules can be added here to keep them in order.