Mellow

A warm, minimalist colorscheme for (neo)vim

Plug 'adigitoleo/vim-mellow'

• Screenshots
• Light theme
• Dark theme
• Installation
• Usage
• Options
• Customization
• Miscellaneous

Screenshots

Taken on alacritty with LiberationMono font:

Do you want a statusline as well? Try the mellow statusline!

Light theme

Dark theme

Installation

If you use a vim plugin manager (recommended), consult the relevant documentation. Here are some links to popular plugin managers:

• Pathogen
• NeoBundle
• Vundle
• vim-plug

For manual installation, download the files from GitHub and put the colors folder inside:

• ~/.vim/ (vim users)
• ~/.config/nvim/ (neovim users)

Usage

To apply commands at startup, add them to the end of your configuration file (see :help vimrc).

You can omit the termguicolors part if you are running (neo)vim in a GUI, or if you have set g:mellow_cterm_ansi = 1.

:set termguicolors
:colorscheme mellow

The colorscheme works for both background=light and background=dark according to the screenshots above. See :help 'background'.

If it doesn't look right, you might not have a truecolor compatible terminal. It might be worth reading :help 'termguicolors' and :help xterm-true-color before opening an issue.

Options

Use Mellow color palette in the embedded terminal:

• enabled (1) by default if your (neo)vim has the terminal feature
• :let g:mellow_terminal_colors = 0 to disable

NOTE: Colors in existing :terminal buffers are NOT re-drawn when changing set background. You will need to kill and restart any :terminals to see the new colors.

Define optional User1..9 groups using Mellow colors:

• disabled (0) by default
• :let g:mellow_user_colors = 1 to enable

Use the first 16 terminal colors as the cterm{bg,fg} fallback colors:

• :let g:mellow_cterm_ansi = 1 to enable
• uses [16,256] color codes for the fallback colors by default (0)

NOTE: The default fallback colorschemes are rudimentary and intended for debugging purposes only.

Customization

To make small changes to a colorscheme, use autocommands (see :help autocmd). For example, to make line numbering use the normal background color:

augroup fix_colors
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorScheme mellow hi LineNr guibg=None
    autocmd ColorScheme mellow hi CursorLineNr guibg=None
augroup END

If you use ALE, you might prefer stronger highlights for warnings/errors:

augroup ale_highlights
    au!
    autocmd ColorScheme mellow hi link ALEWarning Visual
    autocmd ColorScheme mellow hi link ALEErrorLine DiffDelete
augroup END

Miscellaneous

This theme was first motivated by a lack of bg=light option in vim-farout, which uses a similar minimalist set of warm red and yellow colors. I wanted a light theme with moderate contrast and warm colors, that didn't make me want to change every single syntax file. To me, Mellow lies mid-way between :syntax off and popular themes like solarized or gruvbox.

And that's just the way I like it :)

Since the theme uses only 16 colors, you can use the same colors in your terminal of choice. Check the wiki for an example Alacritty theme, as well as experimental Mellow colorschemes for some other Linux stuff.

Some more links, for your convenience:

• RGB mellow palette (bg=light)
• RGB mellow palette (bg=dark)
• mellow statusline