I have the following in my .vimrc:
hi CursorLine ctermfg=00 ctermbg=00 cterm=bold
I should be unable to read the line the cursor is on, but I am able, because the text appears in grey. If I remove cterm=bold, I get true black, so it seems to be black or bold, but not both. Is "bold" a variable for a color in the theme (solarized light)? Or is my terminal theme overriding the fg color somehow? I get the exact same results in various terminal apps (on Xubuntu).
By typing :help attr-list you will get a whole list of possible values for cterm argument:
bold underline undercurl
inverse italic standout
term={attr-list} attr-list highlight-term E418
attr-list is a comma separated list (without spaces) of the
following items (in any order):
bold
underline
undercurl not always available
reverse
inverse same as reverse
italic
standout
NONE no attributes used (used to reset it)
These terms are not colors but they are considered as typographical emphasis. They add more font and shape to the text.
First, highlighting of the cursorline is disabled by default so there's no reason whatsoever to hack your colorscheme if you don't want it: just don't enable it. For the record, that feature is enabled with :set cursorline and disabled with :set nocursorline.
See :help 'cusorline'.
Second, the "bold" keyword is passed more or less directly to your terminal emulator which is ultimately in charge of deciding what to do with it. It may display "bold" text with a bolded font or use a brighter or color or… whatever. Use "bold" only if you know how your terminal emulator will react to it.
Third, Solarized is an over-engineered and very poorly written colorscheme that's a lot harder to hack than necessary. It's really a bad platform for experiments and customization.
Related
I fold some of the functions on my C code. When I fold them, the color becomes gray. Is there any way to change the color of folded part to another color?
You can use the :highlight setting. For instance, to set the background to red, add this to your .vimrc:
highlight Folded ctermbg=red
You can view a list of supported colour names by running :source $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/colortest.vim. ctermbg updates the console background; ctermfg updates the console foreground; and guibg & guifg update gvim's background and foreground colours. If you're changing gvim's settings, you can use whatever hex code you like (you don't have to restrict yourself to supported colours).
Type :verbose hi it will describe you all the highlighting groups and where they are defined. There is probably one describing the Fold but I don't know the group name by heart.
In latex files I have the on-fly spelling switched so you can imagine that together with the syntax highlighting there is already a lot of colors in the terminal screen. When in such environment I am running a string replacement, say with :%s/x/y/gc I need a lot of time to identify where the string-to-be-replaced is located in all this color mess. Is it possible to make vim's current selection blink?
You change the highlighting of the to-be-replaced text with highlight IncSearch.
For example,
:highlight IncSearch ctermfg=Red guifg=Red
highlights the text with a red background (despite it being fg not bg).
However, I don't think there's any way to make it blink (and are you sure you really want that?). You might be able to use italics or underlines instead. See :h highlight for the options that are available.
In the theme I'm using for vim, the strings are shown in red color but the problem is I have spellcheck on and the misspelled words are also shown in red color.
This makes it hard to see what is the mistake until you go to that word and delete any character.
I want to make the highlightation of the misspelled word in somewhat lighter then it currently. Say #ff2929.
You can use the hi (short for :help highlight) command in your ~/.vimrc. The general structure is:
hi SpellBad ctermfg=015 ctermbg=000 cterm=none guifg=#FFFFFF guibg=#000000 gui=none
The cterm is for terminal vim and the gui is for gVim. The fg stands for foreground and is the color of the letters and the bg stands for background and is the color behind the letters.
Terminal colors can be 0-15 for standard terminal colors (8 normal and 8 bright) or 0-255 for terms supporting 256 colors, like xterm-256colors. The gui colors are in hexadecimal format. xterm-color-table is a useful reference for both 256 and hexadecimal colors. The final option can be used to specify bold, italic, or none (neither).
In your case, it might be simplest to set the foreground to black to make the letters stand out. First, find a word that's mispelled with :set spell and then typing asdflkjasldf or something. Then type :hi SpellBad ctermfg=000 guifg=#000 and see if that's a solution you like. If not, use the xterm-color-table or another color reference to find a color you do like.
Try this:
:hi SpellBad guibg=#ff2929 ctermbg=224
guibg is for GUI
ctermbg is for TERM
I found the following to halfway work for a more complex example involving colorscheme, but it is sensitive to the order of .vimrc commands. I tested with Cygwin/mintty and Git Bash, vim 8.0, with similar results. I edited a markdown file with "misspelled" words in headings and paragraphs, so an additional factor is the auto-formatting that vim is doing for markdown. If the .vimrc order is spell, colorscheme, and then hi (trying to use white text on red background), the result for misspelled words is white foreground on black background (image below), regardless of whether in markdown heading or paragraph. This is OK but I'd prefer to have the background for misspelled words be more eye-catching, which is why I specified red background.
However, if the order is spell, hi, and colorscheme, the result is OK in paragraphs but undesired pink on red in headers (image below). This is actually the original behavior without hi, which makes sense because the colorscheme is probably stepping on the hi settings. Based on other testing, the relative position of hi and colorscheme is what is important.
I think I'm going to go with the first option because at least the highlights seem to be in all content, but it would be nice if the red background is used. The following is my .vimrc lines for the first case. Any guidance to fix this would be appreciated.
" Turn on spell-checker
set spell
" Color scheme
" To pick from available list do:
" :colorscheme _space_ Tab
" Reasonable options seem to be: koehler, murphy, elford
colorscheme koehler
" Using the colorscheme with spellchecking results in highlights with
" pink text on red background, which is hard to read, so change the highlight color.
" Color table: https://github.com/guns/xterm-color-table.vim
" Use white text on red background for misspelled words.
hi SpellBad ctermfg=015 ctermbg=009 cterm=bold guibg=#ff0000 guifg=#000000 gui=bold
While using Vim for most of my coding, I typically prefer to have the current line under-lined so it's easier to see where I am in my code. I avoid using things like line-highlighting because it usually makes things harder to see with my bright-text-on-dark-background theme (ie: 'torte' colorscheme).
Here is part of my Vim colorscheme:
hi CursorLine guibg=#0F2130 ctermbg=NONE cterm=underline
hi CursorColumn guibg=#0F2130 ctermbg=darkgray cterm=NONE
I then enable these features in my .vimrc file (ie: ~/.vimrc).
So, in my case, the current line has a colored underline which is the inverted color of the character above it, while the current column has a dark-grey background, while all other text just has a black background.
The only problem I am having here is that I cannot see underscore ('_') characters while coding because the underline for the current line is the exact same color and thickness as the underscore characters. The only workaround, if its even possible, that would make sense here is to:
Increase the spacing between lines
Make the underline appear a few pixels further below my text
Is anything like this possible in Vim (not gVIM)?
Thank you.
If you are using gVim:
:hi! def link CursorLine SpellBad
It will use curl-underline.
Changing the linespace to 10+ will display _ above the Cursorline:
:set linespace=10
#kev: +1; It works in gVIM
However, it seems this just can't happen in Vim, as other commenters have noted.
In the end, I just set the background to be dark grey (ie: ctermbg=253), and then set the cursorline to be darker (ie: ctermbg=black cterm=NONE).
From there, I updated my BASHRC file to contain the following:
export TERM=xterm-256color
This, of all luck, ends up looking better than my previous colorscheme. I now have a modified version of the standard "slate" color scheme with a very dark gray background (ie: ctermbg=253) while the current line has a solid black background.
In GVim I'm using a fixedsys-like font which looks good, but with italic text it breaks (chars partially unreadable, especially the last italic one if the next one is regular).
For this reason (and because I dislike italic text anyway) I'd like to completely disable italic text in Vim; without modifying any syntax highlighting related files.
When using the highly recommended Solarized theme, you can configure this using:
let g:solarized_italic=0
Whether syntax highlighting uses italic text or not is defined by your colorscheme. Any colorscheme rule can define term, cterm, and/or gui attribute lists, which are described at :help attr-list. You can either clear the relevant colorscheme rules or remove the italic attribute from them.
For example, if the following rule is in your colorscheme
hi IncSearch gui=italic guifg=#303030 guibg=#cd8b60
you would want to simply remove the gui=italic bit. You can also specify not to use any of the attributes from attr-list by setting gui=NONE.
When using the highly recommeded Dracula theme, you can configure this by adding the following to your ~/.vimrc:
let g:dracula_italic = 0
From dracula's documentation
Having issues with font styles (italic, bold, underline)?
Be sure your terminal supports these styles.
If running tmux, see tmux section.
If all else fails, disable the style by setting let g:dracula_<style-name> = 0 in your vimrc, where <style-name> is one of (italic, bold, underline, undercurl,
inverse)