Tip #178: Making a "derived" colorscheme without copy & paste

Suppose there's a colorscheme that you're pretty fond of, but hate one or two particular aspects about.  For example, I love the "blue" colorscheme that ships with vim, but I find it's colors for the non-active status line to be unreadable.  Here's how to create a colorscheme which extends "blue" without copying it to a new file and editing it.

In my ~/.vim/colors, I created a "my-blue.vim" file with these contents:

"these lines are suggested to be at the top of every colorscheme
hi clear
if exists("syntax_on")
   syntax reset
endif

"Load the 'base' colorscheme - the one you want to alter
runtime colors/blue.vim

"Override the name of the base colorscheme with the name of this custom one
let g:colors_name = "my-blue"

"Clear the colors for any items that you don't like
hi clear StatusLine
hi clear StatusLineNC

"Set up your new & improved colors
hi StatusLine guifg=black guibg=white
hi StatusLineNC guifg=LightCyan guibg=blue gui=bold

That's all there is to it.

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