I am a fairly new user of WSL and vim, and I wanted to install a new colorscheme for terminal vim. I do the standard steps: Create a ~/.vim/colors directory, then move the theme.vim files there. And when I open vim I can select them with :colorscheme, but the theme I get is entirely different from the one I installed. I have tried three different themes now and none of them have worked as expected.
Anyone one here knows what the cause of this could be?
Tl;dr: make sure the colorscheme fits your environment.
Vim colorschemes can have any of the following properties, alone or in combination…
8/16color-friendly colorschemes use the terminal emulator's 0-based 16 colours palette. Since various terminal emulators have different defaults and that palette is user-configurable it is impossible to predict accurately how it will look like.
You can expect these colorschemes to work reasonably well in most terminal emulators.
256color-friendly colorschemes use a semi-standardised 0-based 256 colours palette with the lower 16 indices corresponding to the aforementioned 16 colours palette. This means that colours 16 to 255 can reasonably be expected to look the same across modern terminal emulators.
You can expect these colorschemes to work well in many terminal emulators if your $TERM environment variable is set to something ending with 256color, xterm-256color being the most common correct value.
GUI-friendly colorschemes use hexadecimal values like in HTML/CSS for the best possible experience. If a colorscheme is GUI-friendly, it is automatically true-colors-friendly, which makes it suitable for use in terminal emulators that support the so-called "true color" feature.
If you use GUI Vim, then you don't have to worry about anything with these colorschemes. If you use Vim in a terminal emulator, then you will have to check if it supports the "true colors" feature and, if that's the case, enable it in Vim with :help 'termguicolors'.
Colorscheme authors are usually explicit about those things so you should be able to tell if a colorscheme fits your needs or not just by reading its README. If that is not the case, you can try looking for these hints in the code:
ctermbg and ctermfg only set to colour names or to numbers 0-15 means that the colorscheme is 8/16color-friendly.
Note that the name notation is more portable than the number notation.
ctermbg and ctermfg set to numbers 0-255 means that the colorscheme is 256color-friendly.
guibg and guifg present means that the colorscheme is GUI-friendly/true-color-friendly.
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 using vim in iterm2 and my color schemes looks really weird.. in macvim they are prettier and in my iterm2 thay look horrible.
For example, this is "ir_black":
And this is "ir_black" on macvim:
why this is happening and can I fix it?
If you use the "original" ir_black colorscheme, you'll notice that the cterm* values are all color names like darkgray. This means that the colorescheme uses whatever default 16 colors you have set up in your terminal emulator.
iTerm's default colors are different from the colorscheme's colors so you get... what you get, which is not what you want.
You have, at least, two practical solutions:
set your terminal emulator's 16 default colors to the ones indicated at line 43 of ir_black.vim or
setup your terminal emulator to pretend that it's xterm-256color and use a 256 colors variant of ir_black.
I have tried two schemes, desert and wombat and I have set the colorscheme in my .vimrc file. When I open vim from my shell I don't see the color of the scheme, but when I open with MacVim I do. In both, when I type :colorscheme I see the scheme that is set in the .vimrc file, but I fail to see why I don't see the colors.
As a note, I installed the spf13 distro and uninstalled it using the script provided.
Any thoughts of how can I troubleshoot this?
First, check how many colors are supported by your terminal:
:echo $TERM
:set t_Co?
The colorscheme must actually support terminals by providing term= and cterm= definitions; many don't. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/12949536/813602 for how to work around this with the CSApprox plugin.
Inspect the colorscheme file (found in the colors/ subdirectory), or use the :highlight command to list the current color definitions.
Terminal emulators are limited to 256 colors max and often need manual setup to go beyond 8 or 16.
The coolest Vim colorschemes are designed for GVim/MacVim which can display thousands of colors.
Because of 1 and 2 it is impossible to fully emulate a GUI colorscheme in a terminal emulator if the GUI colorscheme uses colors outside the 256 colors in the X11 palette.
However, you could:
use a colorscheme that works in GUI and CLI
use a colorscheme that works only in CLI and another that works only in GUI and switch between them in your ~/.vimrc depending on the context
use a plugin that converts your GUI colorscheme on the fly: this one, this one, this one or this one
edit your colorscheme manually to add terminal support
Terminals support 88 or 256 colors. Even if your terminal supports 256 colors, you have to specify that your terminal support it in your vimrc. (cf. Using GUI color settings in a terminal)
set t_Co=256
Concerning your background, you should maybe specify that you are using a dark or a light background if your theme doesn't already declare it.
set background=dark
set background=light
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.