This is just a simple reminder for myself.  To get VIM working with custom color schemes on Ubuntu Desktop, you need to install a couple extra packages.

Here are the steps to install the molokai theme from GitHub properly:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vim-gui-common -y
sudo apt-get install vim-runtime -y
mkdir -p ~/.vim/colors
cd ~/.vim/colors
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomasr/molokai/master/colors/molokai.vim

And to enable it as default, you have to edit your “~/.vimrc” file to say the following color scheme line. I also left in a couple lines that help arrow keys and backspace to work normally for the heck of it.

set nocompatible
set backspace=2
colorscheme molokai