How to get the list of all installed color schemes in Vim?

Type

:colorscheme then Space followed by TAB.

or as Peter said,

:colorscheme then Space followed by CTRLd

The short version of the command is :colo so you can use it in the two previous commands, instead of using the "long form".

If you want to find and preview more themes, there are various websites like Vim colors

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You can see the list of color schemes under /usr/share/vim/vimNN/colors (with NN being the version, e.g. vim74 for vim 7.4).

This is explained here.

On the linux servers I use via ssh, TAB prints ^I and CTRLd prints ^D.

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Just for convenient reference as I see that there are a lot of people searching for this topic and are too laz... sorry, busy, to check for themselves (including me). Here is a list of the default set of colour schemes for Vim 7.4:

blue.vim
darkblue.vim,
delek.vim
desert.vim
elflord.vim
evening.vim
industry.vim                                                                                                                                                 
koehler.vim                                                                                                                                                  
morning.vim                                                                                                                                                  
murphy.vim                                                                                                                                                   
pablo.vim                                                                                                                                                    
peachpuff.vim                                                                                                                                                
ron.vim                                                                                                                                                      
shine.vim                                                                                                                                                    
slate.vim                                                                                                                                                    
torte.vim                                                                                                                                                    
zellner.vim 

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If you are willing to install a plugin, I recommend https://github.com/vim-scripts/CycleColor.

to cycle through all installed colorschemes. Nice way to easily choose a colorscheme.

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Here is a small function I wrote to try all the colorschemes in $VIMRUNTIME/colors directory.

Add the below function to your vimrc, then open your source file and call the function from command.

function! DisplayColorSchemes()
   let currDir = getcwd()
   exec "cd $VIMRUNTIME/colors"
   for myCol in split(glob("*"), '\n')
      if myCol =~ '\.vim'
         let mycol = substitute(myCol, '\.vim', '', '')
         exec "colorscheme " . mycol
         exec "redraw!"
         echo "colorscheme = ". myCol
         sleep 2
      endif
   endfor
   exec "cd " . currDir
endfunction

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If you have your vim compiled with +menu, you can follow menus with the :help of console-menu. From there, you can navigate to Edit.Color\ Scheme to get the same list as with in gvim.

Other method is to use a cool script ScrollColors that previews the colorschemes while you scroll the schemes with j/k.

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Looking at my system's menu.vim (look for 'Color Scheme submenu') and @chappar's answer, I came up with the following function:

" Returns the list of available color schemes
function! GetColorSchemes()
   return uniq(sort(map(
   \  globpath(&runtimepath, "colors/*.vim", 0, 1),  
   \  'fnamemodify(v:val, ":t:r")'
   \)))
endfunction

It does the following:

Gets the list of available color scheme scripts under all runtime paths (globpath, runtimepath) Maps the script paths to their base names (strips parent dirs and extension) (map, fnamemodify) Sorts and removes duplicates (uniq, sort)

Then to use the function I do something like this:

let s:schemes = GetColorSchemes()
if index(s:schemes, 'solarized') >= 0
   colorscheme solarized
elseif index(s:schemes, 'darkblue') >= 0
   colorscheme darkblue
endif

Which means I prefer the 'solarized' and then the 'darkblue' schemes; if none of them is available, do nothing.

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i know i am late for this answer but the correct answer seems to be

See :help getcompletion():

:echo getcompletion('', 'color')

which you can assign to a variable:

:let foo = getcompletion('', 'color')

or use in an expression register:

:put=getcompletion('', 'color')

This is not my answer, this solution is provided by u/romainl in this post on reddit.

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A great solution, and my thanks to your contributors. For years I've been struggling with a totally crappy color scheme -- using SSH under Windows Vista to a Redhat system, terminal type xterm. The editor would come up with a black background and weird colors for various keywords. Worse -- that weird color scheme sticks in the xterm terminal after leaving Vim.

Really confusing.

Also, Backspace failed during an insert mode, which was nasty to remember -- though Delete did the same thing.

The cure --

In the SSH monitor, select Edit/Settings. a. Choose Profile Settings/Colors b. check 'enable ANSI colors' c. The standard Text colors are probably OK Add these lines to $HOME/.vimrc: colorscheme default if &term == "xterm" set t_kb=^H fixdel endif NOTE: the ^H MUST be typed as ctrl-V ctrl-H. Seems peculiar, but this seems to work.

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Try

set wildmenu
set wildmode=list:full
set wildcharm=<C-z>
let mapleader=','
nnoremap <leader>c :colorscheme <C-z><S-Tab>

in your ~/.vimrc.

The first two lines make possible matches appear as lists. You can use either or both.

The fourth line makes leader , instead of the default \.

The last line allows you to simply type ,c to get a list and a prompt to change your colorscheme.

The third line effectively allows for Tabs to appear in key maps.

(Of course, all of these strategies I've learned from the internet, and mostly SO, very recently.)

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Another simpler way is while you are editing a file - tabe ~/.vim/colors/ ENTER Will open all the themes in a new tab within vim window.

You may come back to the file you were editing using - CTRL + W + W ENTER

Note: Above will work ONLY IF YOU HAVE a .vim/colors directory within your home directory for current $USER (I have 70+ themes)

[user@host ~]$ ls -l ~/.vim/colors | wc -l 72

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