Random color scheme picker for neovim

My vim journey

When I was in grad school, I learned Git and Vim for the first time. I was intentionally trying to learn only one of these tools. My main editor was Text Wrangler, Sublime Text (the shareware version that kept bugging me to purchase a license), Atom (for a hot minute), RStudio (once it had the ability to pop out panes), and finally Vim once I needed to start editing scripts on the SLURM cluster when I was at UNL. By 2018, I made Vim my primary IDE and never looked back.

Last year, while I was on Sabbatical, I decided to switch over to NeoVim and subsequently caused a huge mess in my config files. After working that way for a year, on August 1, I decided to yeet the whole thing and start anew with LazyVim. I cloned the LazyVim starter template and it has been so wonderful to have tools like proper LSP support so that I can now jump around to function definitions without having to use grep. It’s also great because I can use <Leader>uC to switch my colorscheme from a list of installed themes.

Color schemes

So there’s one thing about me that may not seem obvious, but I am heavily influenced by my peers. At one of my workplaces, I saw that a colleague was using a light-color scheme for his editor. He said that it avoids the sudden change in lighting when he switches between his editor and reading documentation on a website. I thought it made sense, so I switched over and adopted a light color scheme as well.

Another thing about me is that I can get bored with the same colorscheme easily. I started with PaperColor and then moved to Rose Pine and then to Catppuccin. The good thing about all of these themes is that they all have the ability to auto-detect what the background color is and switch to the appropriate dark/light variant.

However, I found myself switching between them often and never being satisfied and I saw other color schemes that looked good, but either required a manual switch to the light theme (e.g. strawberry_dark vs strawberry_light) or they were only appropriate for one background (e.g. FairyFloss is really only suited for a dark theme, IMO). This frustrated me because if I wanted to use these themes, I had to be in the right mode.

Random choice

I wanted a way to randomly choose my colorscheme whenever I started my editor and I wanted that theme to respect the dark mode setting. Initially, I found f-person/auto-dark-mode, which gave me a way to automatically switch between light mode and dark mode, but that was still unsatisfying because I wanted the randomness.

I was inspired by the zenbones theme collection when I stumbled upon randombones, which gives a random zenbones theme. The only downside is that some of the themes were only light or only dark mode, which made them unfit for my purpose, so I decided to modify it.

I ended up writing a lua function called znk_colorscheme(), which picks a colorscheme randomly from a dictionary and applies it. I have three dictionaries set up:

1. one with light mode themes
2. one with dark mode themes
3. one with themes that auto-switch

The function takes “light” or “dark” as the argument and then appends the corresponding table to the auto-switching themes table and then picks a random theme. This way I can manually curate my themes and know that I will always end up with a random theme that I like.

With this function, I was able to set up functions for auto-dark-mode to trigger when dark mode toggles. I guess the function could probably be a plugin and I could configure it so that it detects whether or not there is a light variant, but I’m happy with the way it turned out for now.