hestia.vim

A dark and light colorscheme for Vim and Neovim — violet accent, saturated brand-anchored syntax hues, and a WCAG-AA contrast discipline behind every colour choice.

This is the editor colorscheme of the hestia Linux desktop, packaged standalone for people who want the theme without the project. Vim and Neovim draw from one colour table — same palette, same highlight groups in both.

Features

• One file, both variants — set background=dark or light before (or after) colorscheme hestia; the scheme follows &background.
• Vim and Neovim, one colour language — Neovim's treesitter captures (@keyword, @function.call, …) and LSP semantic tokens are linked to the same highlight groups Vim's regex syntax uses, so what each colour means can't drift between the editors; diagnostics and their underlines are mapped to the palette too. (The two still tokenise differently — treesitter parses where Vim pattern-matches — so token boundaries can differ in places, e.g. markdown structure or TODO markers. The screenshots below are plain Vim.)
• Truecolor with an exact 256-colour fallback — with termguicolors you get the exact palette; without it, hand-picked xterm-256 cells.
• Accessibility as a design rule — every plain-text syntax foreground clears WCAG AA (4.5:1) against the ground and the raised surfaces (cursorline, popup menus) of its variant.
• A tasteful italic layer — builtins, parameters, self/this/cls and booleans render in their group's colour but italic: extra structure without extra hues.
• Diff fills, not recoloured text — vimdiff rows get low-saturation tinted backgrounds while the code on them keeps its syntax highlighting (most schemes flood-recolour the whole line):

Install

Requires Vim 8.2+ or any maintained Neovim. termguicolors is recommended (exact colours); 256-colour terminals work via the built-in fallback.

lazy.nvim

{
  "dimitrios-git/hestia.vim",
  lazy = false,
  priority = 1000,
  config = function()
    vim.o.termguicolors = true
    vim.o.background = "dark" -- or "light"
    vim.cmd.colorscheme("hestia")
  end,
}

vim-plug

Plug 'dimitrios-git/hestia.vim'

set termguicolors
set background=dark   " or light
colorscheme hestia

Vim native packages

git clone https://github.com/dimitrios-git/hestia.vim \
    ~/.vim/pack/themes/start/hestia.vim

Manual — copy colors/hestia.vim into ~/.vim/colors/ (Vim) or ~/.config/nvim/colors/ (Neovim).

Palette

The ground is #1a1a1a (dark) / #f5f5f5 (light), text #e0e0e0 / #1a1a1a, and the accent — cursor, statusline, selections — is the hestia violet #7c3aed in both variants. The syntax hues:

Role	Dark	Light
Keywords, operators	#4a8fe4	#1c65bd
Strings	#32a148	#247534
Functions	#f840ac	#c60777
Types	#e0a020	#855f12
Constants, numbers	#ff4f38	#cc1800
Preprocessor, imports, decorators	#0cb2c0	#08717a
Escapes, regex, special	#9e77f7	#733af4
Comments	#8c8c8c	#6c6c6c
Errors	#d70000	#d70000

The green/magenta/coral/teal/purple family comes from thecodingidiot's Memphis brand accents; keyword blue and type yellow are deliberate functional anchors (a warm/cool split code needs to scan). Each hue is lightness-tuned per variant until it clears AA.

More languages

TypeScript

Rust

Go

C

Lua

Shell

Markdown

vimdiff, light

Screenshots are plain vim (no plugins) in kitty with Lilex Nerd Font, shot headlessly by hestia's screenshot rig — just the terminal surface, no desktop chrome around it. (Python is up top.)

Contributing — this file is generated

colors/hestia.vim is a generated artifact: it is rendered by themes/hestia/render.py from hestia's palette (palette.yml, the single source of truth for the whole desktop — terminal, bat, VS Code, web code blocks all render from the same tables) and mirrored here verbatim. The version of this repo tracks the palette version stamped in the file's first line.

• Bug reports and suggestions: issues are welcome here.
• Colour changes: land in hestia's palette.yml/scopes.yml and are re-rendered — a PR editing colors/hestia.vim directly can't be merged, since the next render would overwrite it.

Attribution

• The palette's ancestor is wildcharm by Maxim Kim — hestia's palette was originally derived from it, and this scheme preserves that lineage (with hestia's documented deviations: the violet accent, the Memphis-brand syntax re-anchor, AA-driven lifts).
• Syntax hues from thecodingidiot's Memphis brand accents.
• Generated from the hestia palette, where the design decisions (and their reasoning) are logged.

License

GPL-3.0, same as hestia.