In RStudio, I use the “Material” color theme, which has a midnight blue background similar to the popular “solarized” theme. In my never-ending quest to transform my Terminal/Vim/iPython set up into something more like RStudio, I wanted to figure out how to do this in Vim.

The solarized theme has been created for many environments, including Vim. However, one thing I learned after an embarrassing amount of time is that the Vim-specific package works best for Vim GUIs like, Mac Vim. If you follow the advice about using Vim in Mac’s Terminal carefully, you will learn that the best route here is to solarize the Terminal itself — in which case, Vim will be solarized by default.

git clone https://github.com/altercation/solarized
cd solarized/osx-terminal.app-colors-solarized/
open Solarized\ Dark\ ansi.terminal   # opens new colorized terminal and automatically
open Solarized\ Light\ ansi.terminal   #     loads Dark / Light Palette into system
# To set as default, in mac's top-most bar:  
#        Terminal > Preferences > click on one / set as default

If you do this, you have to discard any of the advice associated with the Vim-specific solarized package. That is, comment out any of this stuff in your .vimrc file (if it’s there):

"set term=xterm  
"syntax enable
"set background=dark
"colorscheme solarized
"let g:solarized_termcolors=16 "default, if Terminal not solarized then  256

To my surprise, I actually like the light solarization for Terminal better than dark.