vim-galore

Colorschemes are the way to style your Vim. Vim consists of many components and each of those can be customized with different colors for the foreground, background and a few other attributes like bold text etc. They can be set like this:

:highlight Normal ctermbg=1 guibg=red

This would paint the background of the editor red. See :h :highlight for more information.

So, colorschemes are mostly a collection of :highlight commands.

Actually, most colorschemes are really 2 colorschemes! The example above sets colors via ctermbg and guibg. The former definition will only be used if Vim was started in a terminal emulator, e.g. xterm. The latter will be used in graphical environements like gVim.

If you ever happen to use a certain colorscheme in Vim running in a terminal emulator and the colors don't look like the colors in the screenshot at all, chances are that the colorscheme only defined colors for the GUI.

Here's a list of commonly used colorschemes:

base16
gotham
gruvbox
jellybeans
molokai
railscasts
solarized (or a lighter variant of it: flattened)
vividchalk

I use gruvbox for the GUI and janah for the terminal.

Basics

Managing plugins

Pathogen was the first popular tool for managing plugins. Actually it just adjusts the runtimepath (:h 'rtp') to include all the things put under a certain directory. You have have to clone the repositories of the plugins there yourself.

Real plugin managers expose commands that help you installing and updating plugins from within Vim. Hereinafter is a list of commonly used plugin managers in alphabetic sequence:

Plug is my favorite, but your mileage may vary.