Zenbones is a light vim/nvim colorscheme designed to highlight code using contrasts and font variations. Colors are tasked only for other roles such as diagnostics, diffs, search matches.

A rock garden in Ryōan-ji.

Requirements

Primarily built for nvim but it works pretty well with vim. However here are some requirements to take full advantage of the colorscheme:

24-bit RGB colors (nvim or vim compiled with +termguicolors)
Font with bold and italic
Terminal or GUI with bold and italic support

Installation

Example installation using packer:

use "mcchrish/zenbones.nvim"

-- Optionally install Lush. Useful if you want to extend the theme
-- e.g. create a statusline plugin theme using zenbones colors
use "rktjmp/lush.nvim"
-- See Advanced Usage section for more details

Usage

Just apply the colorscheme as usual:

set termguicolors
colorscheme zenbones

Alternatively, if you want to make use of the lua version:

set termguicolors
colorscheme zenbones-lush

It works pretty much the same as the first one but pretty handy when extending or customizing the colors to your likings.

Showcase

Diff highlights

Diagnostics

Font used is Iosevka.

Other plugins support

Aside from LSP and basic Tree-sitter support, there are only a few plugins that are currently supported. Please feel free to open a PR to support your favorite plugins.

Advance Usage

Zenbones is pretty extensible thanks to Lush. You can easily retrieve the colors in lua:

local theme = require "zenbones"
local colors = require "zenbones.colors"

print(theme.StatusLine.bg.hex)
print(sand.darken(20).hex)

One such example is the custom lualine theme.

See also Lush's documentation for the complete options.

Other implementations

iterm2

Print terminal colors

You can retrieve the terminal colors by using this command:

:lua require("zenbones.print").print_terminal_colors()

...
Terminal colors
foreground: #2C363C
background: #F0EDEC
ansi color0: #2C363C
ansi color1: #C23C55
ansi color2: #617437
ansi color3: #914B27
ansi color4: #286486
ansi color5: #88507D
...

Useful when you want to apply a zenbones theme to your terminal.

Inspirations

Zenbones is heavily inspired by Verdandi and vim-yin-yang. The name came from a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

There are more similar colorschemes with few colors from this collection.