Vim has a plethora of beautiful color schemes available, both packaged with Vim and made by community members.

You can change the color scheme by changing the colorscheme setting in your .vimrc, as follows:

:colorscheme elflord

To get a list of currently installed color schemes, execute :colorscheme Ctrl + d. This will list every installed color scheme:

In the preceding example, I'm using :colorscheme PaperColor from
https://github.com/NLKNguyen/papercolor-theme.

You can further customize the color scheme by setting the background option to either light or dark (the option must precede the colorscheme call).

For example, this is how the same color scheme as in the preceding screenshot (PaperColor) looks with set background=dark: