When comparing Gruvbox vs One Dark, the Slant community recommends Gruvbox for most people. In the question“What are the best VIM color-schemes?” Gruvbox is ranked 1st while One Dark is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Gruvbox is:
Three different variants are available, each with different contrasts.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple contrast options
Three different variants are available, each with different contrasts.
Pro Very easy on the eyes
Both the light and dark version have a reddish background for a consistent look when toggling between them.
Pro Have light and dark version
Dark background has brown-yellowish retro colors, light background is yellowish with pastel highlights.
Pro Made ready for multiple text-editors
Ports for Atom, Sublime, TextMate and Emacs and other text editors are available.
For a full list of available ports.
If you are using a Jetbrains IDE.
Pro You can go all day with Gruvbox
Pro It can be customized in detail
Size of the tabs, icons of file types, contrast of the color schemes, accented colors, indentation in the sidebar, sizes of the status bar and dozens more.
Pro Colors are calm and easy to distinguish
Its wide hue range with good saturation/value use make a good enough contrast to skim the code fastly and not too vibrant to kill your eyes.
Pro Available for vim
Pro Available on a wide range of applications
KDE Plasma, VsCode etc...
Pro Available for Intellij IDEA
Pro Available for Atom clones and Sublime
Possibly for others too
This theme is a default one for Atom text editor.
Pro Default theme for Doom Emacs
Pro Calm blue background
If used with flux, it turns into warm gray during night.
Pro Available as a base16 theme
Pro Includes GUI themes
Cons
Con That white is very painful to look at using an F.lux like applications
While it looks quite good for some time, using Night Shift/F.lux applications just makes reading things with Gruvbox quite painful.
Con Ports to other applications are not always accurate.
Con Kind of fadey
The colors aren't that bright (which may be good for some people).