Installation & Activation

Get up and running in a few lines of code with your favorite plugin manager or manual setup

This is a living document which means it is work in progress, not completed yet and can change at any time while the project is still in development major version zero 0.y.z!

Vim in terminal mode must be used with a Nord terminal emulator theme in order to work properly!

Make sure to install one of the currently supported terminal emulator port projects **before** installing Nord Vim.

Vim in terminal mode uses the 16 color codes provided by the terminal emulator.
When used with another color theme than the one provided by one of Nord's terminal emulator ports, the colors in Vim won't use Nord's color palettes!
This will result in different styles than those defined by Nord Vim and could make it appear that there is a problem with the Nord Vim theme while the actual problem are missing Nord colors.

Read the GitHub Gist about terminal colors for more information about terminal color specifications.

Installation

Thanks to existing plugin/runtimepath managers for Vim, Nord Vim can be installed for all platforms and the various variants/forks of Vim in a uniform way within a few lines of codes. The recommended manager is vim-plug, but any other manager like pathogen or Vundle can also be used.

To automatically download and activate Nord Vim, follow the install instructions for vim-plug and

add Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim' to your vimrc within vim-plug's plugin loading function
run the :PlugInstall command in Vim

Screenshot showing a minimal vimrc with installed and activated Nord color scheme — Minimal `vimrc` with installed and activated Nord color scheme

By default, the latest version will be installed. To use the latest development state from the develop branch instead, vim-plug allows to specify the branch:

Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim', { 'branch': 'develop' }

To install an explicit version the corresponding Git tag can be specified instead:

Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim', { 'tag': 'v0.11.0' }

Manual

To install Nord Vim manually, download the latest version or clone the repository.
Afterwards copy the nord.vim file into the .vim/colors located in your home directory.

Screenshot showing the GitHub repository web UI to download the project repository

Activation

To activate and use Nord Vim as your default color theme set it in your vimrc:

colorscheme nord

To switch to the theme on-the-fly run the :colorscheme nord Vim command.

When using vim-plug the theme can also be configured to only automatically activate on-demand for specific languages…

" Activate Nord Vim when editing Go files.
Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim', { 'for': 'go' }

…or on specific events.

" Activate Nord Vim when toggling the NERDTree.
Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim', { 'on':  'NERDTreeToggle' }