Making vim look like textmate (again!)

A few years ago I posted about my quest to make editing ruby in my terminal as beautiful as in Textmate. I’ve been back on linux for a year now but it’s only tonight I’ve gotten around to sorting out my vim display.

RedCar, an open source cross platform alternative to TextMate, reminded me how pretty code can look. Tonight I worked out how to make vim on ubuntu lucid look just as lovely.

1. Grab the twilight256 colorscheme and drop it into ~/.vim/colors/twilight256.vim
2. Make sure you’re using 256 color terminal (I put this in ~/.bashrc) export TERM=xterm-256color
3. Tell vim to use this colorscheme (I put it in ~/.vimrc) colorscheme twilight256
4. In my terminal under “Edit” -> “Profile Preferences” I selected “Deja Vu Sans Mono Book” “13”

I can’t believe it took me so long to do this but I’m glad I finally have.

Ruby can look pretty under Vim on Linux