With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. » Just some alien fruit salad to keep you in the zone.

One day I had gotten totally annoyed with the neon-on-day-glo-vomit-with-sprinkles-of-multicolor colorschemes for the Vim editor, so I decided to write my own. After it seemed to be somewhat ready, I named it Zenburn and uploaded it to the Vim site. This was in 2002. Now it seems the little colorscheme has started to grow on its own! What follows is the short history of Zenburn.

After the initial upload, time passed like time has the habit of doing. People seemed to like the color scheme, and I was happy, as I had made it for myself and tweaked it carefully, little by little, while doing real development using the editor, so it was nice to see people appreciate it. Some more time passed, and I had almost forgotten about Zenburn.

Then one day, the people of Cream contacted me and wanted to include Zenburn as part of the Cream distribution. Although a bit perplexed, I was honored that they chose to include it. The Cream posse had some nice suggestions which went in to Zenburn, and a new version was uploaded shortly afterwards.

Again, time passes, and, as I use Zenburn daily, I tweak it little by little whenever I stumble upon odd spots which break the harmony. Around this time or later, moving around at work gets me a place next to a window. The zen which burns too pale doesn’t feel perfect, so I tweak the colors to achieve a slightly darker version. From this point forward, Zenburn is actually two schemes in one - one for light, one for dark, toggleable as described within the color scheme itself.

One day a mail comes in from Kurt Maier. Kurt had done very nice work by porting the entire Zenburn to 256-color cterm entries - this means Zenburn-colors in terminals with 256 color support. We merged my unreleased Zenburn with Kurt’s cterm-Zenburn with a few mail iterations, and a new version was soon uploaded.

Currently I know of the following pages with healthy and nutritious Zenburn-derivatives:

Zenburn for KDE konsole by Christoffer Sawicki
Daniel Brockman has a page with adaptations for Emacs (!), XTerm, ion, ratpoison, etc.
Zenburn scheme ported to Visual Studio 2005 by Jeff Atwood
Jakub Piotr Cłapa Zenburnt his entire desktop!
by Dominykas Djačenka.
SubEthaEdit Zenburn by Henrik Bergius.

A tip of the hat to you. May you be forever in the zone.

If you can help make Zenburn better, please contact me. For example, currently there is very little support for the latest syntax groups (which means they will likely end up looking totally strange). This is mostly because I might not use such syntax groups myself, at least not until someone tells me how and where and why to use them.

And I’ll try hard to upload some unreleased changes soonish.

PS. You might want to check this Vim color scheme testing tip by Shan Leung Maverick Woo. The page is handy if you wish to see what different color schemes look like and which ones you might want to try.

Edit: thanks to Jakub C. for notifying me I had a wrong name for him!

Edit: added link to Notepad++ port, thank you to Dominykas “Chaosteil” C!

Edit: added link to Henrik Bergius’ page. (Seems to be updating a lot - me thinks I should make a static page of this post….)

19 Comments so far

You’re my color theme hero, Jani. I’ve been using Zenburn every day for the last three years and I still love it. May you be forever in the zone, too.

Thanks for sharing Zenburn’s history. May the zone be with you. :)

Funny thing, I’m not Justin Mecham but that’s my screenshot. ;] Oh, and there is my blog, kind of zenburn (I’m quite bad at the design department) too. :P

Oh… I know where you got that Justin Mecham. I guess it should be Jakub Piotr Cłapa and Justin’s copyright is rather about the Jabber blog engine code. ;-)

I’m also the owner of zenburn.net domain and always wanted to make some sort os site with all the customizations in one place. Just, you know, “Everything zenburn!”

As you may see I failed to create this site but I could use some help and offer some hosting (not 100% stable but not on my home DSL either) if anyone would like to do such thing. :-)

I love the colors, but must I use gvim to have them? I’d like to continue using regular terminal-window vim, but the colors don’t show up right in vim!

Mark, you might enjoy Kurt’s contribution to Zenburn. He made support for 256-color terminals (peek inside Zenburn.vim file).

I’m not quite sure how to use or configure such terminals, as I don’t use such a thing myself currently. When I tried to get cterm working in the past, Konsole (of KDE) had some trouble with that. And being the lazy bastard that I am, I reverted back to GVim.

But if you get the cterm working nicely, please post here and/or send a link to your experiences so I can update this page!

Here’s an interesting Wiki page about enabling 256 colors in Vim.

Hi,
I’ve created color scheme for Kate/Kdevelop, heavily inspired by your zenburn. More info. you can find at http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/zenburn+-+eye-gentle+Kate+color+scheme?content=66209

Very cool, thanks Lukasz! Zenburn seems to be popping up in many new places, and it makes me quite happy. Btw I corrected the link too, so no worries.

One day when I have time I must go through Vim 7 features and make sure every color in the theme is consistent. E.g. markers are perhaps not so nice at the moment in Zenburn.

Thank you. Zenburn is being used.

I don’t think I’d be able to keep coding without Zenburn.

Here is my conversion of Zenburn for Notepad++, even though it only supports a few languages (like C, C++, and a few more):

Good stuff!

I started porting Zenburn to the SubEthaEdit collaborative editor:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/zenburn_colors_for_php_editing_in_subethaedit.html

Has anybody done any work on zenburn for IntelliJ IDEA ?

Thank you. I’ve manage to setup my PHPeclipse with zenbrun color theme and it’s great!

Nice theme! Does anyone have a WinEDT version of Zenburn?

I just created a full kde3 color scheme for zenburn. it can be found at http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Zenburn?content=78681

I’ve taken the liberty of posting a Zenburn colorscheme for konsole 2.0 in kde4 to save people having to do it manually. It’s basically a rip-off of Christoffer Sawicki’s original Zenburn for Konsole.

More here.

And you can find a Typo/Css Zenburn theme at http://hisham.cc.

This is a great theme, thanks for making it. If anyone would be motivated enough to do a scite port, I’d be incredibly grateful.

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Just some alien fruit salad to keep you in the zone.