I recently came across solarized. I started to use it immediately for vim and mutt, but after a few days the low contrast of the color scheme started to annoy me. Oh and btw, I’m red/green color blind.

I went searching and found “xoria256” a color scheme suited for 256 color terminal and a dark background. There is even a Ubuntu/Debian package for it: vim-scripts. Unlike solarized it doesn’t come with a custom palette, just use Tango in gnome-terminal (or whatever your favorite is).

But of course I wasn’t completely happy with it as I wanted some more blue-ish colors in there.

So tweaked it a little, and this is the result:

I’ve also ported it over to mutt, so that it has a matching color theme.

Note: I haven’t changed the name of the color scheme, but it should be called something different, xoria256m or something. It is also still a work-in-progress, I will probably open a git repository on github soonish.