The right colors for your VIM

I have a lot of Vim colorschemes, and I like to change them very often, reflecting my mood. I needed a way to showcase them all and quickly pick one.

The original Vim Color Scheme Test script by maverick.woo is written in Perl and the build works on Windows systems. I wanted to add some new features, and to test it with my own colorschemes, but as I’m not very confident with Perl, I preferred to start over with a new Ruby version instead of forking his project. Here’s my version (and here’s the github page):

The script loads all your colorschemes from your default vim directory (~/.vim/colors), and writes into the output dir an HTML file for each colorscheme, with a render of a Ruby file using this colorscheme. It also writes a different copy for each language present in the samples/ directory. It also builds an index page for each language, with a showcase of how the colorschemes render the sample code, a download link for each colorscheme and a nice lightbox to preview it.

To run it, you’ll need:

• ruby
• macvim
• tilt rubygem (to render the index template)

What still needs to be done:

• Separate light and dark colorschemes
• Make this work with versions of vim different from MacVim
• Add the current language name to index pages
• Add more languages (currently only Ruby and Python are supported)

ATM, the script uses a vim server named VIMCOLORS and sends it remote commands. This was made to make it faster, because opening a single macvim instance for each script required too much time. However, the --remote-send command of vim doesn’t wait for previous remote-sends to be completed, so I had to add a sleep 1 command in the script to prevent it from messing up the execution flow. Any hint to solve this is greatly appreciated.