Vibrant Ink, Visual Studio and Vim settings
I'm a big fan of the Vibrant Ink theme for Textmate. I spent some time last year porting the color scheme to both vim and Visual Studio - that's what you can see in the screenshot. I'm releasing my _vimrc and vssettings files if you want to experiment with this stuff in your local configuration.
I also use ViEmu in Visual Studio so that I can use the same keybindings everywhere. This is especially important if you're doing Windows development on a Macbook Pro since there are missing keys - and the key chords that you have to use daily on a MBP to achieve equivalent functionality to a standard PC keyboard are annoying at best, or will lead to RSI at worst.
You may notice an inconsistency between my vim and VS settings. I was a two-space indent guy before coming to the company, but everyone else around here has a thing for four-space (not tab- yay!) ident, so I caved.
Update: I'm an even bigger fan of Fusion now, since the crazy race condition problem for grabbing a wireless network connection here on corpnet seems to be gone. This problem manifests itself when I suspend my MBP by closing its lid. When I open the lid, both the Mac OS and Windows machines try to grab their own wireless connection on corpnet (I cannot use NAT). Under Parallels, this would result in my laptop getting booted off corpnet (maybe 50% of the time) until I shut down Parallels, waited until my host OS got a connection to corpnet, and then restarted Parallels. This wasted a ton of time, and resulted in me walking around a lot with the lid open ...

Have you seen vividchalk for vim?
http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=1891
Posted by: Chris Ortman | June 15, 2007 at 10:32 AM
Thanks for sharing John! What XP theme do you use?
Posted by: Mike Sax | June 15, 2007 at 10:34 AM
That's a pretty nice style, John. I find it a bit "too vibrant" for me, but pretty good still :)
I had heard about VIMEmu but for some reason I had not bothered to try it... maybe I will soon!
Posted by: Tomas Restrepo | June 15, 2007 at 11:08 AM
Thanks! Got it up and working on my version of Visual Studio - This is great!
Posted by: Josh Charles | June 15, 2007 at 11:09 AM
Thanks John, much appreciated.
Posted by: Nick Parker | June 16, 2007 at 08:48 PM
So sweet - thanks! The contrast seems a bit too high, but having a VibrantInk look-alike in Visual Studio is great!
Posted by: Kevin Williams | June 16, 2007 at 09:12 PM
@Mike Sax,
If not mistaken, that's the Zune theme. You can download it from go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078
Posted by: M. David Peterson | June 17, 2007 at 11:52 AM
Hello John,
I created a .vim colorscheme based on your initial work:
http://blog.jozilla.net/2006/10/5/vibrantink-theme-for-vim
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1794
Maybe it's good to team up and integrate both our work into one colorscheme?
Posted by: Jo Vermeulen | June 25, 2007 at 06:13 AM
I am a little late to comment, but what is it about Vibrant Ink that is appealing?
Is it aesthetics alone or does it help with reading and understanding the code in some way?
Posted by: Mark Kruger | July 24, 2007 at 09:36 AM
Great work John, looks even better when you set the font to: "Lucida Sans Typewriter"
Posted by: Dan | August 02, 2007 at 07:39 PM
John, thank you very much for your fantastic job. I have just announced your theme on my blog! Good work!
Posted by: Sandro M. | November 06, 2007 at 09:11 AM