Not being too fussy about colorschemes in Vim, and spending much more time in terminals on various machines rather than being able to use a GUI wrapper with Vim for full color, I stuck with desert256 for quite some time because it was one of the defaults, worked pretty much everywhere, and looked sensible for most of the languages in which I write. I have found a few things that I wanted to change though, in particular completely removing the clunky color-approximation code that never quite worked right for me. I’m calling my fork Sahara.

Other changes include:

• Most inactive or non-text regions are now in dark grey, including line numbers and window separators
• Clearer indication of inactive and active windows with black and white status bar text respectively
• Removed some unnecessary noise from HTML and PHP syntax highlighting with a couple of linked groups
• Red, green, and blue backgrounds for removed, added, and changed sections in vimdiff
• Monochrome tones for the autocompletion menu to replace the pretty horrifying defaults
• Aqua for incremental search, deep blue for completed search highlighting

These are mostly pretty subtle changes, but if you use gVim or a 256-color terminal as well and you like the way desert256 works, this could possibly be of use to you. There’s a Git repository for it.

Screenshot using the Sahara colorscheme