One of the best parts about personal software is customization. The process of personalizing a tool to add your own flair can fill you with satisfaction. Setting your phone background, customizing the theme of your group chat, and setting your IDE theme are all ways of melding a part of yourself with the software you use. If you use neovim, you may want to set the colorscheme to match your own personal tastes.

Setting the colorscheme in neovim is part function, part style. You want to choose a colorscheme that's nice on the eyes, has a nice contrast ratio for syntax highlighting of the types of files you edit, and makes the important things stand out.

For me, this process has been filled with some frustration. Modifying my colorscheme included some discovery (what colorschemes are out there?), experimentation (how does this colorscheme look with my files?), and iteration (open config, set the colorscheme, close vim, open one of my files, repeat). At one point, I settled on Dracula as my colorscheme of choice, but I've since grown dissatisfied and wanted a change.

I use vim-plug to add functionality to my neovim installation. One of my favourite plugins is fzf-vim. During a bout of frustration with my colorscheme, I was browsing the neovim help topics to learn more about colorschemes by typing :h col and then hitting tab to show all help topics that start with col. Eventually, I found the help topic for :Colors, a command provided by the fzf-vim plugin. This command is crucial to anybody who wants to experiment with different colorschemes.

The :Colors command shows a popup with all registered colorschemes in your vim installation, including those provided by plugins. You can search through this list if there's a particular one you want or navigate with the up and down keys on your keyboard. As you navigate this list, the colorscheme will change automatically, allowing you to rapidly preview multiple colorschemes on the contents of the current buffer.

I enjoy the zellner light theme and the zaibatsu dark theme, personally. Hope this helps you find a colorscheme you enjoy.