A vim theme that conveys syntax with colorful background highlighting (instead of colored text).

Crafted with the magnificent Colortemplate.

The shoji "theme" is actually a pair of themes.

shoji_niji is the exuberant one, showering syntactic rainbows.

shoji_shiro is the restrained one, content with pristine black-and-white, except where color is unavoidably practical.

If you don’t have a preferred plugin helper, consider trying vim-plug, which can be installed with:

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

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

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
Plug 'haystackandroid/shoji'
call plug#end()

...then restarting vim and running PlugUpdate (from the vim command line).

To activate a shoji theme, add one of the following to your vimrc:

• colorscheme shoji_niji
• colorscheme shoji_shiro

A keybinding for the ShojiToggle() function can be used to switch between the two shoji themes:

noremap <C-s> :call ShojiToggle()<return>

Change <C-s> (which denotes the keystroke [ctrl+s]) to suit your preference.

To set mode-specific cursor shapes in terminal vim, see the vim tips wiki.

For instance, to set cursor shapes in vte-compatible terminals (like urxvt):

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

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

To set cursor color in (vte-compatible) terminal vim, wrap the vim command in a shell function.

For bash/zsh, add the following to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

vim() {
  printf "%b" "\033]11;#fafafa\007\033]12;#2a2a2a\007"
  sh -c "vim $*"
  clear
  printf "%b" "\033]11;#2e3440\007\033]12;#d8dee9\007"
}

For fish, add the following to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

function vim
  printf "%b" "\033]11;#fafafa\007\033]12;#2a2a2a\007"
  sh -c "vim $argv"
  clear
  printf "%b" "\033]11;#2e3440\007\033]12;#d8dee9\007"
end

Replace 2e3440 and d8dee9 with the background and foreground colors of your terminal theme.

For neovim, substitute vim with nvim.

These samples (drawn from Rosetta Code) use vim's built-in syntax detection for each filetype.