vim-colors-pencil

A light (and dark) color scheme for Vim inspired by iA Writer

Features

iA Writer is an elegant word processor, marred only by its lack of Vim. It does have a nice color scheme, however.

• Accurate colors
• Subtle indicators of changes in the gutter for Signify, git-gutter, etc.
• Use for both code and prose, though it’s definitely geared towards the latter
• Light and dark variants
• iTerm color scheme available for using this color scheme with terminal-based Vim

Requirements

Currently requires vim >= 7.0

Installation

Install using Pathogen, Vundle, Neobundle, or your favorite Vim package manager.

Or simply copy the color scheme file to your ~/.vim/colors directory.

Usage

Just like any other color scheme:

:colorscheme pencil

You can toggle between the light and dark variants:

:set background=dark
:set background=light

Differences

Most notably, the ‘#’ heading text is shaded blue. This compensates for the lack of a visual cue found in iA Writer where the heading indicators are inside the left margin. Here we use color instead.

Font choices

iA Writer uses a typeface called ‘Nitti Light’ by Blue Monday. ($)

Free alternatives with bold and italic support include:

• Anonymous Pro (serif)
• Courier Prime (serif)
• Cousine
• DejaVu Sans Mono
• Liberation
• Luxi Mono Regular (serif)
• Ubuntu Mono

Cousine is a good match for Nitti Light.

See also

• mattly/iterm-colors-pencil - iTerm support for terminal-based use of the pencil color scheme
• pencil color scheme at vim.org

If you find this plugin useful, you may want to check out these others by @reedes:

• vim-lexical - building on Vim’s spell-check and thesaurus/dictionary completion
• vim-litecorrect - lightweight auto-correction for Vim
• vim-pencil - rethinking Vim as a tool for writers
• vim-quotable - extends Vim to support typographic (‘curly’) quotes
• vim-textobj-sentence - improving on Vim's native sentence motion command
• vim-thematic — modify Vim’s appearance to suit your task and environment
• vim-wheel - screen-anchored cursor movement for Vim
• vim-wordy - uncovering usage problems in writing

The README in thematic has more details on setting up emulation of iA Writer.

Future development

If you’ve spotted a problem or have an idea on improving this color scheme, please post it to the github project issue page.