When you stare at a display full of text for hours at a time, a nice looking color scheme is worth the time it takes to set up.
Enter Solarized, a great option for improving your overall text-editing life.
My officemate Kevin has been evangelizing Solarized for a while, so today I took the plunge and set it up, and man do I wish I had done this a while ago. Much of the content described below is straight from his setup - I definitely owe him.
The set of software I'm currently using with Solarized is:
- iTerm2 (since in my experience it handles Solarized better than Terminal.app)
- The command-line vim that ships with OSX
- pathogen.vim (for easy installation of vim plugins)
- The Solarized config files for iTerm2 and vim
- NERDTree (a tree explorer for vim)
For future reference, here's how I set everything up:
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Download the stable version of iTerm2 from iterm2.com
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Download and unzip the latest version of the Solarized .zip file (it contains the iTerm2 preset files you'll need)
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In iTerm2, open iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Colors, and click Load Presets... to load the Solarized color schemes (light and dark) that are found in the .zip in
solarized/iterm2-colors-solarized/
For more info see the iterm2-colors-solarized README.
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Follow these instructions from the pathogen github README to install pathogen. In the next step, we'll be using pathogen to install more bits.
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Install solarized.vim using pathogen:
(For more info see http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/vim-colors-solarized)
cd ~/.vim/bundle git clone git://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized.git
In the parent directory of vim-colors-solarized:
mv vim-colors-solarized ~/.vim/bundle/
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Install NERDTree:
(See also http://programming34m0.blogspot.com/2011/04/nerd-tree-file-explorer-with-mac-vim.html)
cd ~/.vim/bundle git clone git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git
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Set up your .vimrc appropriately - here's mine:
set ruler set cursorline call pathogen#infect() syntax on filetype plugin indent on syntax enable " Solarized stuff let g:solarized_termtrans = 1 set background=dark colorscheme solarized
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OPTIONAL: A nice choice for a terminal font is Inconsolata-dz - you can download it here, and configure iTerm2 to use it:
http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-double-quotes-inconsola/