I enjoy the Solarized color scheme, so I figured out how to set it up in Vim. The Solarized color scheme provides a plugin for Vim, which makes this pretty straightfoward. The following instructions detail how to do this on Ubuntu 20.04, but other than the installation step, this should work on any Unix-like system so long as Vim is at least version eight. This guide assumes you are familiar with installing packages from the command-line on Ubuntu, git, configuring Vim, and using Vim packages.[1]

  1. First, install Vim and Git if you haven’t already done so.

    sudo apt -y install git vim

  2. Create a plugins directory according to Vim’s plugin directory scheme for autoloaded plugins, i.e. \~/.vim/pack/\*/start.

    mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start

  3. Download the Solarized plugin’s git repository in this directory.

    git clone https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized.git \
  ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start/vim-colors-solarized

  4. Optionally, update the help index with the new plugin’s documentation.[2]

    vim -u NONE -c "helptags vim-colors-solarized/doc" -c q
    From within Vim, access the plugin’s help documentation with :help solarized.

  5. Enable the Solarized Dark color scheme in your Vim configuration file.

    ~/.vim/vimrc
    syntax enable
set background=dark
colorscheme solarized
1. Vi and Vim StackExchange: What is the Vim8 package feature and how should I use it?
2. Arch Wiki: Vim - Using the built-in package manager