I 'm working on MacOS Catalina and I am using vim 8.2
The only profile set up in my iterm2 is the Default one.
which has been set up to used a slightly customized solarized theme as depicted below
I am now opening vim (which has also been set up to use its counterpart solarized colorscheme)
My question is, why when I am opening the :terminal in vim, this opens in black background (I don't think there even exists a profile with such setting)
This will happen when you have Vim running with 'termguicolors' on. (You can confirm it and see where it's being enabled with :verb set tgc?.) Same as when running in a GUI (not the terminal), it will tell Vim to use 24-bit colors, and use the color scheme full RGB color specifications, rather than use the terminal color palette.
In that situations, Vim's colors get completely detached from those of the terminal where Vim is running, so Vim's built-in terminal no longer has access to the actual terminal colors.
You can set specific colors to use in Vim's built-in terminal with the g:terminal_ansi_colors variable (see :help g:terminal_ansi_colors for details.)
Alternatively, disabling 'termguicolors' should work as well. Assuming the Vim color scheme has been built in a way that will use the terminal color scheme to reproduce the same colors, it might not have other side effects in how Vim colors otherwise look.
Removing line
set termguicolors
from .vimrc fixed it
I am working with dark background in both Vim an GVim. However, in the GVim the dark background is not loaded automatically (through .vimrc), but stays light and I need to set it automtically for every session. See the screenshots below.
Loading a file in Vim:
Loading a file in GVim:
Executing set background=dark after loading a file in GVim (note that set background=dark is indeed in my .vimrc):
What can cause this problem?
As romainl already indicates, the background option tells Vim what the background color looks like. You could enable the background to dark with the syntax higlighting. As it seems, you're using a GUI. So consider the following in your .vimrc:
hi Normal guifg=grey guibg=black
hi stands for higihglighting. And guifg and guibg stands for, as you probably already guessed it, for GUI foreground and background colors.
I am trying to use this color scheme
https://github.com/goatslacker/mango.vim
It works when I open vim from the command line. But I usually open files from the file manager GUI and that opens them in gvim. The color scheme displays a white background in gvim. How do I fix it so it displays a dark background?
I've looked at the mango.vim file and it has the line set background=dark but apparently that is not working.
Vim separates between term, cterm (color terminal) and gui since they are capable of handling different numbers of colors
mango.vim only gives highlighting instructions for cterm. If it were for gui aswell it would look like this:
hi Comment term=bold ctermfg=Red guifg=Red0
So if your color-scheme lacks gui support it will reset to default.
I am using vim in 256 color mode on Solaris (connected via Putty on Windows). Everything looks great and works fine outside of tmux, but within tmux the background color changes periodically when paging/scrolling through a file.
Here is how it's supposed to look:
Here is how it appears after paging around a bit:
Thanks!
As explained here, disable Background Color Erase (BCE) by clearing the t_ut terminal option (run :set t_ut= in Vim and then press Control+L to refresh the terminal's display) so that color schemes work properly when Vim is used inside tmux and GNU screen.
Per the above link, BCE can be set in .vimrc by adding the following
if &term =~ '256color'
" disable Background Color Erase (BCE) so that color schemes
" render properly when inside 256-color tmux and GNU screen.
" see also http://snk.tuxfamily.org/log/vim-256color-bce.html
set t_ut=
endif
Adding an alternative solution, as I ran into this problem myself and only just solved it. I had the correct TERM value, the terminfo file was there, etc., but the background would still only be drawn behind cells that contained printable characters, or cells to the left of them.
If you switch between GUI vim and CLI vim often, you may have put something like this in your .vimrc file at some point:
if !has("gui_running")
set term=xterm
endif
(Or really any overriding at all of the TERM variable within .vimrc)
Change the terminal override to screen-256color.
...
set term=screen-256color
...
This looks like an issue with your term setting, or terminfo.
Make sure that your term in tmux is TERM=screen-256color and that your solaris box has the correct terminfo.
This bug is fixed in vim 7.4 patch 7.4.1942
Relevant issue: 804
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..
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.
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"
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:
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
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. . .
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
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:
256-color support in your terminal - Putty with default settings does have this
Vim has to recognize that the terminal is 256-color capable: "set t_Co=256" in your .vimrc will do it
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.
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
Use this rule if you use Vim through SSH:
Add to your local .bashrc:
export TERM=xterm-256color
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'
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.
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:
echo $TERM in bash should give xterm-256color.
in vim, :set t_Co should give t_Co=256.