Vimdiff, Better Highlighting

The Problem: It’s ugly

If you love vimdiff and fugitive then you are probably sick of the terrible color schemes that come default. I’ve played around with the highlight options a bit but overall I’ve never been super happy with the outcome. Currently my current vimdiff colorscheme looks like this:

Terrible vimdiff highlighting

Now I don’t know about you but I personally am not a fan of my text being all the same color; I know some people are. So I thought I would do some googling to figure this out but when I tried to google “Vimdiff better highlighting” I didn’t come up with much. So here I am trying to make it easier for others to get diff colorscheme of their dreams.

The Solution: All the colors of the rainbow

Well not all of them, just a larger subset. The first part is figuring out how to change the diff colors. There are 4 main groups at play here and you can set them to whatever you heart desires with the following in your .vimrc:

highlight DiffAdd    cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=2
highlight DiffDelete cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=1
highlight DiffChange cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=6
highlight DiffText   cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=6

This will get you something similar to what I had posted in the picture. Notice how I’m using the cterm prefix, vim has 3 different terminals for highlighting, from :help highlighting:

term    a normal terminal (vt100, xterm)
cterm   a color terminal (MS-DOS console, color-xterm, these have the "Co"
        termcap entry)
gui     the GUI

That’s right, were going to be setting this up for a color terminal. If you aren’t already using 256 colors in your terminal I suggest you google “How to set up xterm-256color” and get someone more knowledgable to give you advice there. So let’s go with the assumption that you have 256 colors and try shaking things up a little bit.

highlight DiffAdd    cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=22
highlight DiffDelete cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=52
highlight DiffChange cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=23
highlight DiffText   cterm=NONE ctermfg=0 ctermbg=23

Vimdiff highlighting with dark background

But now it’s even harder to read and you think I’m crazy but here’s where the magic comes in. How about we stop having black text and we have our regular colorscheme over the dark background? Just set the ctermfg=NONE:

highlight DiffAdd    cterm=NONE ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=22
highlight DiffDelete cterm=NONE ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=52
highlight DiffChange cterm=NONE ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=23
highlight DiffText   cterm=NONE ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=23

Vimdiff highlighting getting better

Now were getting somewhere. I still find this a little hard to read somtimes so I bold the text to make it stand out even more with cterm=BOLD:

highlight DiffAdd    cterm=BOLD ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=22
highlight DiffDelete cterm=BOLD ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=52
highlight DiffChange cterm=BOLD ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=23
highlight DiffText   cterm=BOLD ctermfg=NONE ctermbg=23

The best vimdiff highlighting

Now this is much better! Hopefully this helps save you some strain when trying to read the diffs.