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A few years ago, a question on vi.stackexchange caught my attention. @oarfish wanted a way to change their colorscheme depending on the time of the day.
In a world where Apple has a tool by default on most of its devices to change the colorscheme from dark to light during the day and where a lot of developpers use extensively f.lux or redshift it does make sense to be able to change your favorite text editor colorscheme automatically too.
To add this feature I made a very simple plugin which takes for variables as its configuration:
g:dayTime and g:nightTime which are two arrays used to describe when in the plugin should switch the colorscheme in the morning and in the evening.g:dayColorscheme and g:nightColorscheme which are the names of the colorschemes to use for each time of the day.The source code is on Github.
This plugin leverages the timer function of Vim >8 and neovim (See :h timers) to regularly check the current system hour, compare it to the configurations of the plugin and call :colorscheme accordingly.
This was interesting to create this plugin because I didn't have an opportunity to play with Vim's timers before. However after a few days of use I realized that I actually like my colorscheme and I don't want to change it during the day. So I soon stopped using this plugin but this gave me another idea.
I noticed that my main pain point related to my colorscheme was when I switch vim to the diff mode using :h :diffthis. I realized that my current colorscheme didn't do as well as the previous one in diff mode. So I came up with a pretty simple trick in my .vimrc:
" Color configuration
try
" Define the default colorscheme and the one used in diff mode
let g:colorsDefault = 'forest-night'
let g:colorsDiff = 'jellybeans'
" Set up the default colorscheme when vimrc is sourced
execute "colorscheme " . g:colorsDefault
catch
echo "Colorscheme not found"
endtry
" Diff configurations
" Easier diff commands
command! DT execute "colorscheme " . g:colorsDiff | windo diffthis
command! DO execute "colorscheme " . g:colorsDefault | windo diffoffThe idea is very simple: Declare two variables holding the names of the colorschemes I want to use in normal mode and in diff mode and define some wrapper commands around diffmode:
:DT (For DiffThis) will change the colorscheme and then switch every window to diffmode:DO (For DiffOff) will do the opposite: Switch back to default colorscheme and stop diff mode.These lines having been in my .vimrc for a few time now and so far they fit my needs. Maybe in the future I'll also explain with more details how I handle the diff mode in Vim.
Posts in the same category: [vim]