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

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

The pencil color scheme features:

• 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

Currently requires vim >= 7.0

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

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

If you’re looking for greater contrast, set the following in your .vimrc:

let g:pencil_higher_contrast_ui = 0   " 0=low (def), 1=high

It currently only affects the blacks and grays.

Those users who find the parentheses matching disconcerting can disable this default Vim plugin in their .vimrc with:

let loaded_matchparen = 1

See :help pi_paren.txt for more details.

Just like any other color scheme:

:colorscheme pencil

You can toggle between the light and dark variants:

:set background=dark
:set background=light

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.

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.

• 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-textobj-quote - 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.

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