vim colorschemes not changing background color

Question

I try to apply various color schemes in vim that I have seen on the net. Whatever scheme I choose, the background remains white, even though screenshots of the applied scheme shows that the background should be colored.

In some schemes, some of the background change color, but space right of lines containing text still remains white.

I'm using Vim 7.2 on a mac. I have just started messing with non-gui applications, so everything should be pretty much as it was out of the box..

Does the overall settings for the terminal window have something to do with it?

When running macvim, everything looks ok. Its only when starting vim from the terminal things looks strange..

Answer 1

I have this in my .vimrc and it solved this problem for me using while using PuTTY.

set t_Co=256
set background=dark
colorscheme mustang
highlight Normal ctermbg=NONE
highlight nonText ctermbg=NONE

It's important to load the colorscheme before the ctermbg settings in .vimrc because they need to override the same ones set by the colorscheme. This also means you can't switch colorscheme while Vim is running and expect it to work.

Answer 2

I'm adding a second answer from me because it's very different from my first answer and may point to actual problem.

If you look at the actual website for the colorscheme here: Molokai website

you will see a question very similar to yours. Here's answer given, which suggests trying command :set t_Co=256 in your vimrc to see if it fixes things:

"- Make sure you’re using a console terminal capable of 256 colors; not all of them do (particularly on mac). You might need to explicitly force Vim to use that by doing “set t_Co=256″ on your .vimrc file. - The windows console is well… totally unsupported, that only does 16 colors so it’s a mess"

Answer 3

In linux I had export TERM=xterm-256color in my .bashrc. That caused vim to look like this (after setting set t_Co=256):

When I removed that line from my .bashrc and opened a new terminal (exec bash didn't do it) This is what I get:

Answer 4

Terminals are usually limited to 256 colors while GUI are only limited by color depth of your desktop environment, typically 2^32.

So even if there is lots of vim color scheme available around, implicitly they are often designed for the GUI and won't work for the terminal version.

If you look at color schemes on vim.org, there is often a mention of GUI or 256. So you have to chose which to use depending on the context.

To convert a GUI scheme to terminal you can use the following plugin : CSApprox.

You can also use a different colorscheme depending on the context, add the following in your .vimrc:

if has("gui_running")  
    colorscheme [using any color you want]  
else  
    colorscheme [using 256 colors]  
endif  

Answer 5

I think the problem could be the way the default color is changed by the colorscheme. I've looked at some colorschemes that set default merely by:

set background=light

or

set background=dark

Not sure what limitations of those are. I don't think those work in terminals.

In any case, you should be able to manually set background in a terminal by using the 'Normal' highlight. Insert it into a spot before most of the 'hi' commands in the colorscheme file and it should provide defaults they will work with. For example:

hi Normal ctermbg=White ctermfg=Black guifg=Black guibg=White

Change ctermfg (color terminal foreground) and ctermbg (color terminal background) to be whatever you want (or whatever color you were expecting to see in the colorscheme but now aren't seeing). (Remember, though, if the colorscheme already has a setting for hi Normal then this probably isn't your problem.)

For ctermbg and ctermfg you can enter color names, but I think there is only a fairly limited number: Black DarkBlue DarkGreen DarkCyan DarkRed DarkMagenta Brown, DarkYellow LightGray, LightGrey, Gray, Grey DarkGray, DarkGrey Blue, LightBlue Green, LightGreen Cyan, LightCyan Red, LightRed Magenta, LightMagenta Yellow, LightYellow White

Otherwise you should be able to use a number from 0 to 255 in place of the color name. Or this script gives rough idea, and lets you see how you could also set up to use more color names: Vim script with color settings

Also, there are a number of scripts that help you use or convert colorschemes written for gui for use with cterm. E.g.,:

Colorscheme support for cterm

Does the overall settings for the terminal window have something to do with it?

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure a properly written Vim colorscheme will override any terminal settings you've made. At least they do for me in Windows and on Ubuntu. . .

Answer 6

You need to add set termguicolors to your ~/.vimrc

I tested t_Co=256 and other options, but none worked, only set termguicolors

After this you can use the command set bg=light or set bg=dark to see witch one looks better (some vim color schemes accept both options).

Here is a list of terminals that are compatible with termguicolors: https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728#now-supporting-true-color

Answer 7

I had the same problem and found out that the answer to this question is actually threefold, where fixing only two of the three isn't enough. You'll need to have:

1. 256-color support in your terminal - Putty with default settings does have this

2. Vim has to recognize that the terminal is 256-color capable: "set t_Co=256" in your .vimrc will do it

3. The color scheme needs to have support for color terminals with ctermbg and ctermfg attributes for highlights, not just the gui*-versions. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2682 should be able to provide these automatically, and CSApprox I'm using most definitely does, but requires either +gui -compiled Vim or a recent enough Vim version (7.3 or newer).

The third one seems to be the most commonly missed requirement. I wrote a short piece on my own fumblings on this subject just this morning: http://codeandlife.com/2013/09/22/vim-colorschemes-with-putty-aka-gui-vs-xterm-color256/

Final gotcha that happened to me while trying different settings was that when the colors did work, only areas of screen with text had the proper background color. Re-checking Putty Terminal setting "Use background colour to erase screen" fixed that final issue for me.

Answer 8

Does the overall settings for the terminal window have something to do with it?

Yes, terminal parameters override vim parameters (at least in OSX and iTerm). For example, I have a following script in /Users/[username]/.bashrc

setBackground() {  
  osascript -e "tell application \"iTerm\"  
    set current_terminal to (current terminal)  
    tell current_terminal  
      set current_session to (current session)  
      tell current_session  
        set background color to $1  
      end tell  
    end tell  
  end tell"  
}  

vim() {
       (setBackground "{65025,65025,65025}" &)
       (exec vim $*)
}

The above remaps terminal vim command to execute a background color change before executing vim. Background color function is applescript (I copied the script from somewhere...). It works for iTerm. I belive that you can adapt this to work with terminal (apple product + apple script -> should work).

br,
Juha

Answer 9

Use this rule if you use Vim through SSH:

1. Add to your local .bashrc:

   export TERM=xterm-256color
   

2. Remove from .bashrc any TERM definitions.

If you use same .bashrc on both (local and remote), use temporary environment variable and never set TERM globally:

alias color-ssh='TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@host'

Answer 10

This works for me for switching backgrounds:

colorscheme hemisu
function! g:ToggleBackground()
  if &background != 'dark'
    set background=dark
  else
    set background=light
    colorscheme hemisu
  endif
endfunction
nnoremap <silent> <F3> :call g:ToggleBackground()<CR>

Also try setting light background to something like ctermbg=231, so that tmux handles it better.

Answer 11

I have similar issue that the background color of indentation guides (nathanaelkane's vim-indent-guides) cannot be displayed in my Windows Cygwin's mintty terminal.

I solved the issue with a line Term=xterm-256color in ~/.minttyrc (equivalent to set via mintty's Options GUI: Terminal -> Type -> xterm-256color. This has the effect export TERM=xterm-256color. Without this, mintty default to TERM="xterm", which result in vim's t_Co=8 (instead of t_Co=256) and cannot show some background color.

Checklist:

1. echo $TERM in bash should give xterm-256color.
2. in vim, :set t_Co should give t_Co=256.