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
Thank you very much.
Posted by: Mike | November 03, 2008 at 12:14 PM
What's your windows skin? and which software do u use?
Posted by: Afshin Zavar | November 13, 2008 at 09:41 AM
I noticed you mentioned the diff between spaces and tabs. I've always used tabs but recently move to a company using spaces (2). Seems more personal preference, or Unix vs Windows?
What's your pros/cons of using either/or?
I can't seem to hit the right google search phrase today. Thanks.
Posted by: PHenry | February 12, 2009 at 07:54 AM
Very nice - but I can't get NAntAddin to appear when I've got these setting imported. Anyone else have that issue?
Posted by: DJ | February 24, 2009 at 10:57 AM
Cool Theme. Thanks a lot for sharing !!!
Posted by: Ram | March 09, 2009 at 03:53 AM
If you use TAB instead of space, it allows the user to set how to represent that indentation.
Say you like the 2 char indent and I like 4. If we both keep TABs, then the source is the same, just our individual IDE's know how to draw them to our liking.
If we each replace tab with spaces, every time I reformat source you created, the entire source appears to have changed.
Why does anyone use spaces?
Posted by: Aaron S. | March 09, 2009 at 09:07 AM
This is excellent theme than anyone else.
but Ctrl+F, Search box is not working. Dialog Box is not displying.
Posted by: Dutt | June 03, 2009 at 03:38 AM
Thanks a lot, I love this theme!
Posted by: B | August 14, 2009 at 12:52 AM