Zenburn
This is the The Official Zenburn Page
Zenburn is a low-contrast color scheme for Vim. It’s easy for your eyes and designed to keep you in the zone for long programming sessions.
What’s the purpose of this page?
The Wikipedia page for Zenburn is officially deleted, therefore this page attempts to replace the wiki page as a nexus for Zenburn-related information. Unfortunately, unlike a wiki this page is not editable by everyone.
A page is easier to upkeep than a post, plus editing a page doesn’t mess up the RSS feeds (unlike editing a post which was posted a long time ago in the past). That’s why there is now this brand spanking new Official Page.
Latest version and background information
- Zenburn.vim
- Old skool official page
- History of Zenburn
- One day Zenburn was in Slashdot’s comments (and the server nearly melted)
- Screenshot!
- Page at vim.sf.net
Notes
To use Zenburn in GVim, simply copy the file to colors/ subdirectory under your Vim configuration folder (e.g. ~/.vim/colors or C:\vim\colors).
To use Zenburn in Vim, you must enable the 256-color mode for Vim. This can be done with e.g. export TERM=xterm-256color. You might also need to add set T_co=256 into your .vimrc file, before loading the colorscheme. Note, that due to limitations of the 256-color mode the color scheme is not exactly like it appears in GVim, but very close nevertheless.
Have a look at Darmawan’s page for further information and screenshots.
List of known ports and derivatives
- Zenburn for KDE konsole by Christoffer Sawicki. See also below for Konsole 2.0.
- Daniel Brockman has a page with many adaptations. E.g. Emacs (!), XTerm, ion, ratpoison, etc.
- Zenburn scheme ported to Visual Studio 2005 by Jeff Atwood
- Jakub Piotr Cłapa Zenburnt his entire desktop!
- Zenburn ported to Notepad++ by Dominykas Djačenka.
- SubEthaEdit Zenburn by Henrik Bergius.
- “Dark Zenburn Global Style” for Stylish browser plugin.
- Zenburn for KDevelop/Kate by Lukasz “Lookanio” Purgal.
- Zenburn for KDE3 by Kevin Geiss.
- Putty colors by Steve T.
- Marc Kerbiquet uses Zenburn in his Code Browser software.
- Andrew Janke did a Zenburn-configuration file for Gnome Terminal. See also his comment below.
- Jonathan Bonomo made a color scheme for sterjm (project page). You can download the file here.
- Hisham made a Typo/CSS Zenburn theme.
- Juhapekka Tolvanen made a Zenburn config for ctheme.
- Zenburn for Konsole redux by Craig. It’s for Konsole 2.0 (KDE4). Apologies to Craig since I had somehow overlooked his link from the old page.
If you have made a new port, please drop a mail or comment to get it included here.
Thank you for enjoying “Just some alien fruit salad to keep you in the zone”!


14 Comments so far
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Can you please put the colour refence table as it were from the wikipedia entry? It was very useful…
Thanks & keep up the good work.
I wonder who the idiot that asked to have the entry deleted was…
By J.H on 05.05.08 3:25
J.H., I don’t know who it was originally - my guess is some random Wikipedia admin.
As for the deletion, the article was deleted based on lack of notability. After reading the Wikipedia rules, I have to admit I agreed with the verdict to delete, as the article unfortunately did not reach the high level Wikipedia demands. I didn’t like it, but judging the article and the rules objectionably that’s the way it had to go :(
As for the color table, I’ll sure try to add it… if only I can find it from somewhere! It seems that the wikipedia entry has just vanished, as if it never existed. Or I don’t know how to look.
By slinky on 05.05.08 19:39
I copied the contents of the table to a spread sheet on my machine before they took down the page. I’ve uploaded it to google docs. I’ll color it when I get the chance.
By C Betancourt on 05.07.08 18:17
the link didn’t seem to work:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pKLGtBDTfcpZoRtJFr_eeAg&hl=en
By C Betancourt on 05.07.08 18:18
Very good, C Betancourt! I shall make a task for myself to add the table here in the near future.
If you come up with the colors before I add the table, please put a comment here so then I’ll be sure to use the latest version.
By slinky on 05.08.08 20:01
You can get a “gnome-terminal” %gconf file here:
http://mavis.anu.edu.au/ubuntu/zenburn-gnome-terminal/%25gconf.xml
Just drop this in a directory called:
~/.gconf/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/zenburn
and you are good to go. Note that I use a slightly transparent background for this one so perhaps you should increase the saturation of the background a bit but I like it this way!
a
By Andrew Janke on 06.30.08 3:47
I ported Zenburn for ctheme:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctheme/
http://iki.fi/juhtolv/configs/ctheme/
By Juhapekka Tolvanen on 07.05.08 14:58
I put Zenburn and Minimal (a TextMate color theme) together, made a similar one “MinimalZen” for EmEditor (http://www.EmEditor.com), you can find sreenshots in “http://picasaweb.google.com/toadloading/ScreenShots” and my EmEditor color theme in “http://www.box.net/shared/dnj42nqyow”
By ToadLoading on 07.06.08 9:21
I found the
StatusLineto close to the background color, so I set it the same asStatusLineNC. Humbly submitted as a possible patch if you agree.By Charlie on 07.10.08 5:03
Hi Charlie!
I checked your patch, and agreed that the current StatusLine color was lousy. I took your patch in but had to edit it slightly, to be more in line with how GVim looks like.
Anyway, your name shall live forever in the Zenburn file itself, have a look at the latest version :) If you want your full name to be displayed, please send me a mail.
Thanks for spotting it!
By slinky on 07.10.08 20:51
Pardon my ignorance, but does this color scheme work with vim in a terminal or just gvim? I’ve tried using it in a terminal and it doesn’t look right.
By YDobon on 07.19.08 6:46
Ydobon, it works with both gvim and vim - however, one must have 256 colors enabled in the terminal for the colors to look right.
This can be done with
export TERM=xterm-256color, then launching vim. It works under Linux etc. but I’m not sure if that will work under a Windows prompt.…and if it still doesn’t seem to work, check that the terminal emulator supports 256 colors in the first place :)
Thank you Ydobon, I’ll update this page with instructions how to enable the 256-color mode.
By slinky on 07.19.08 10:01
First and foremost: great work. This colorscheme is tight, and I’m loving it.
However, I was running into the trouble under iTerm in osX wherein if I changed my terminal type to anything other than “builtin_ansi”, my arrow keys would stop working within vim. Took me a while, but I finally found a solution, which I thought I should share with anyone else running into the same problem. It’s http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=550 , but it’s _NOT_ the actual tip, it’s the suggestion given in the first response there.
I know this isn’t strictly related to zenburn (so I won’t blame you if you kill this post), but manoman was it driving me crazy while I was trying to get your theme to work ;>
Again, great work. Now I need this ported as a theme for irssi.
By mediapathic on 08.21.08 14:09
Thanks Mediapathic! I’ve not noticed problems under Linux, but for the benefit of Mac OS X users, it’s good to have the information.
By slinky on 08.23.08 20:05
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