How do I increase the spacing of the line number margin in vim?

vim margin macvim
Sasha Koss picture Sasha Koss · Mar 28, 2010 · Viewed 14k times · Source

I have a problem with my colorscheme in vim:

alt text
(source: tinygrab.com)

The line numbers are too close to the code. How I can increase the width of the line numbers' right margin?

Answer

Bill Odom picture Bill Odom · Mar 29, 2010

This bothered me, too; I hate having text crammed up against a block of solid color. It makes me claustrophobic.

Here's what I did as a workaround (in MacVim, but I expect the same technique will work elsewhere):

In your preferred colorscheme, set the background color of the line-number column to be the same as the background color for normal text, and the line-number foreground color to something low-contrast and unobtrusive (so it doesn't look like it's part of your normal text). I use white-on-black for normal text, and dark-grey-on-black for the line numbers:

hi LineNr  guifg=#505050   guibg=Black
hi Normal  guifg=White     guibg=Black

Admittedly, this doesn't fix the problem so much as hide it, but it's worked well for me.

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