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tundra: new colorscheme - #308

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jvoisin wants to merge 3 commits into
vim:masterfrom
jvoisin:nord
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jvoisin wants to merge 3 commits into
vim:masterfrom
jvoisin:nord

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@jvoisin

@jvoisin jvoisin commented Sep 16, 2026

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An arctic, north-bluish clean and elegant color scheme (nordtheme.com), built with Colortemplate. Works in GUI/true-color and 256/16/8-color terminals and ships g:terminal_ansi_colors.

Notable choices:

  • markdown/HTML headings (text and leading #) use nord9
  • format-string specifiers highlighted via SpecialChar (nord13)
  • misspelled words are only underlined, letters keep their color
  • numbers/floats nord15, booleans nord9, Decorator uses nord12

@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 16, 2026 •

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It looks like this:

image image

@habamax

habamax commented Sep 17, 2026 •

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I am not sure if the authorship should be "Arctic Ice Studio and Sven Greb", unless you're one of them. Ideally, we would like to have a user who would be the maintainer/author of the colorscheme in this repo.

And if you're not the original author of said colorscheme, we would prefer a different name, not to confuse users.

misspelled words are only underlined, letters keep their color

That would be most probably a no-go. Depending on what exactly you mean and what is in the template.
(just briefly checked it, indeed, this is a no-go -- non-gui version has no spell highlighting other than underline)

Anyway, before going into full colorscheme validation, let's agree on points above.

@neutaaaaan @romainl fyi.

@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 17, 2026

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I am not sure if the authorship should be "Arctic Ice Studio and Sven Greb", unless you're one of them. Ideally, we would like to have a user who would be the maintainer/author of the colorscheme in this repo.

And if you're not the original author of said colorscheme, we would prefer a different name, not to confuse users.

Well, it's a bit tricky, as I've only done the porting of the theme to vim, I didn't design it, so I don't want to claim sole authorship. What about "Arctic Ice Studio and Sven Greb, and Julien Voisin"?

misspelled words are only underlined, letters keep their color

That would be most probably a no-go. Depending on what exactly you mean and what is in the template. (just briefly checked it, indeed, this is a no-go -- non-gui version has no spell highlighting other than underline)

Huh, that's right. I did most of my testing on neovim, which does support this. I'll do some more testing on vim then!

@habamax

habamax commented Sep 17, 2026

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Well, it's a bit tricky, as I've only done the porting of the theme to vim, I didn't design it, so I don't want to claim sole authorship. What about "Arctic Ice Studio and Sven Greb, and Julien Voisin"?

You can give a new name and in the description mention that it is a port of the nord colorscheme.

The thing is that we might ask you to change some things in the colorscheme that will deviate from the origin and might not fully resemble the original nord.

@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 18, 2026

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The catppuccin there has an Author: and Maintainer: field, would it be alright to use those instead?

As for changing the name, I'm not a fan of the idea, as I'd like to have the Nord theme, in vim. Let's include @svengreb in the conversation :)

@chrnz008

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@jvoisin

As for changing the name, I'm not a fan of the idea

it is good to avoid collisions please check #295

An arctic, north-bluish clean and elegant color scheme (nordtheme.com),
built with Colortemplate. Works in GUI/true-color and 256/16/8-color
terminals and ships g:terminal_ansi_colors.

Notable choices:
- markdown/HTML headings (text and leading #) use nord9
- format-string specifiers highlighted via SpecialChar (nord13)
- misspelled words are only underlined, letters keep their color
- numbers/floats nord15, booleans nord9, Decorator uses nord12
@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 19, 2026

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Ah. I renamed it to Tundra, a cold biome, as there is already desert :)

@jvoisin jvoisin changed the title nord: new colorscheme tundra: new colorscheme Sep 19, 2026
@habamax

habamax commented Sep 23, 2026

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GUI

image image
  • PmenuExtra is barely visible
  • PmenuSel & PmenuMatchSel make it impossible to distinguish match vs non-match chars
image
  • MatchParen & Visual -- it is not clear if it was visually selected or not, try to guess if opening { is visually selected.
image
  • VertSplit & VertSplitNC --> might be a good idea to distinct them
image
  • Quite hard to see what is visually selected in Diff
image
  • Spell* are not properly defined
image
  • Quickfixline is almost the same as Statusline
image
  • Visual and Search is very hard to read

@chrnz008

chrnz008 commented Sep 23, 2026 •

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image

hl-CursorLine and hl-TabLineFill should be different

i also recommend changing hl-TitleBar

jvoisin added a commit to jvoisin/colorschemes that referenced this pull request Sep 23, 2026
Rework several highlight groups flagged during review of vim#308 to
improve contrast and make related groups visually distinct.

- Spell*: define proper highlighting instead of plain underline.
  Colored fg + underline in cterm, colored undercurl in gui, and
  reverse fallback for 16/8-color terminals (SpellBad nord11,
  SpellCap nord13, SpellLocal nord8, SpellRare nord15).
- Search/IncSearch: use dark fg on nord13/nord12 bold for
  readability (were low-contrast light-on-cyan).
- Visual: darken background to nord3 so selections stand out,
  including over Diff* backgrounds.
- Diff*: lighten backgrounds to nord1 (reverse fallback in 16/8)
  so visual selection remains visible on diff lines.
- MatchParen: drop background, use bold+underline so it no longer
  looks like a Visual selection.
- QuickFixLine: use nord2 background to differ from StatusLine.
- VertSplit/VertSplitNC: give distinct colors (nord3 vs nord1).
- CursorLine/TabLineFill: use different backgrounds (nord1 vs nord0).
- TitleBar/TitleBarNC: restyle to a distinct cyan bar.
- PmenuExtra: brighten fg (nord4) for visibility.
- PmenuMatch/PmenuMatchSel: use nord13 so matched chars are
  distinguishable from selected text.
@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 23, 2026

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Thanks for the feedback, it should look better now :)

@habamax

habamax commented Sep 27, 2026

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Not sure if this Title Bar is ok:

image

@habamax

habamax commented Sep 27, 2026

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Visual and DiffText are the same:

image

Rework several highlight groups flagged during review of vim#308 to
improve contrast and make related groups visually distinct.

- Spell*: define proper highlighting instead of plain underline.
  Colored fg + underline in cterm, colored undercurl in gui, and
  reverse fallback for 16/8-color terminals (SpellBad nord11,
  SpellCap nord13, SpellLocal nord8, SpellRare nord15).
- Search/IncSearch: use dark fg on nord13/nord12 bold for
  readability (were low-contrast light-on-cyan).
- Visual: darken background to nord3 so selections stand out,
  including over Diff* backgrounds.
- Diff*: lighten backgrounds to nord1 (reverse fallback in 16/8)
  so visual selection remains visible on diff lines.
- MatchParen: drop background, use bold+underline so it no longer
  looks like a Visual selection.
- QuickFixLine: use nord2 background to differ from StatusLine.
- VertSplit/VertSplitNC: give distinct colors (nord3 vs nord1).
- CursorLine/TabLineFill: use different backgrounds (nord1 vs nord0).
- TitleBar/TitleBarNC: restyle to a distinct cyan bar.
- PmenuExtra: brighten fg (nord4) for visibility.
- PmenuMatch/PmenuMatchSel: use nord13 so matched chars are
  distinguishable from selected text.
@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 28, 2026 •

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image

Should be better now :)

@habamax

habamax commented Sep 28, 2026

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Could you make a bit more distinct Visual and QuickfixLine?
image

  • Visual and Comment is ... borderline readable, not sure if you can improve on it.
  • Visual and Statusline -- is it possible to distinct it more?
image

@jvoisin

jvoisin commented Sep 30, 2026

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Sure :)

@habamax

habamax commented Oct 1, 2026

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thx.

Now CursorLine, Visual and Diff bg are all the same

image

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3 participants