snow a blue-tinted winter vimscape
background snowy noon			name icewine red-purple				background snowy midnight
highlight snowy day			type poinsettia red				highlight snowy night
comment snowy dusk			special lichen gold				comment snowy dusk
text snowy twilight			statement conifer green				text snowy evening
cursor snowy night			meta-statement iceberg green-blue				cursor snowy day
search light lichen			constant frost blue				search dark icewine
because red is the color of life, reddish text is for...      names, which give life to abstractions (like variables and functions)      types ("meta-names" ), such as variable type (int, char...) or storage class (static, register...) because gold is a special color, gold text is for...      specials (elements that unlock special features), such as delimiters and debug statements because green is the color of proceeding with action, greenish text is for...      statements (the magic "action words" of code), such as conditions (if, then...) or loops (for, do...)      meta-statements ("meta-actions", or "meta-magic" ), such as macros and "include module" statements because blue is the calm color of sea and sky, evoking enduring constancy, blue text is for...      constants (values that are fixed in place), such as booleans, integers, and strings

If you don’t have a preferred plugin helper, consider trying vim-plug, which can be installed (on Unix-like systems) with:

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Having installed vim-plug, snow can be installed by adding the following to the top of your vimrc...

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
Plug 'nightsense/snow'
call plug#end()

...then restarting vim, followed by running :PlugUpdate (at the vim command line).

For a snow day, add the following to vimrc:

colorscheme snow
set background=light

For a snowy evening:

colorscheme snow
set background=dark

To set the background automatically based on the time at which vim is launched:

colorscheme snow
if strftime('%H') >= 7 && strftime('%H') < 19
  set background=light
else
  set background=dark
endif

...which activates the light version of snow during the day (defined here as 7AM-7PM), dark version at night.

The night-and-day plugin can switch themes and/or backgrounds automatically, using absolute or sun-relative time.

snow comes with themes for airline and lightline, which can be activated with the following vimrc code:

Status line themes can be added to the time-based snippet above:

colorscheme snow
if strftime('%H') >= 7 && strftime('%H') < 19
  set background=light
  let g:lightline = { 'colorscheme': 'snow_light' }
else
  set background=dark
  let g:lightline = { 'colorscheme': 'snow_dark' }
endif

Terminals/multiplexers with true-color support (see list) can display the exact snow colors.

In most cases, the only vimrc setting you need is:

set termguicolors

In some cases you'll also need:

let &t_8f = "\<Esc>[38;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"
let &t_8b = "\<Esc>[48;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"

If termguicolors is not set, terminal vim will fall back to an xterm-color approximation of snow.

To set mode-specific cursor shapes in terminal vim, see the Vim Tips Wiki.

For instance, to set cursor shapes in vte-compatible terminals, you could add to vimrc:

let &t_SI = "\<Esc>[6 q"
let &t_SR = "\<Esc>[4 q"
let &t_EI = "\<Esc>[2 q"

...which sets the cursor to a vertical line for insert mode, underline for replace mode, and block for normal mode.