Mac Vim Color Scheme



The next time you access a non-txt file with vim, you will notice highlighted text. Echo 'syntax on' /.vimrc Method 2: Another method, one that I personally use/used, is by installing 'vim -override-system-vim'. First run vim -version in the terminal. Notice the +(s) and -(s) and keep it in mind, maybe even take a picture. To let Vim know that your terminal can do 256 colors, you can either further configure Putty or your shell to set TERM to “xterm-color256” (e.g. Export TERM=xterm-color256). Or you can just add a line to your.vimrc (the if is only for those who like to have different settings for ‘mac’ and ‘win32’): if has ('unix') set tCo=256 endif. (Vim should detect your terminal type automatically, no need to worry about that.) To customize the colors, use the:highlight command. Type:help:hi in Vim for more information on this. For more help on syntax highlighting in general, type:help:syntax-highlighting. If you want to customize it a lot, you can even create a color scheme.

  • 1256 Color Terminals
    • 1.11Documentation
      • 1.11.2Terminal 256 color support list
    • 1.12Release Notes

Summary

Enable terminal programs to use the enhanced color capabilities of modern terminals by default.

I.E. increase their color options from the 8 colors at the top of this picture,to the other 256 displayed.

Owner

  • Name: Pádraig Brady, Kévin Raymond
  • Email: P@draigBrady.com, shaiton@fedoraproject.org

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 18
  • Last updated: 2012-08-01
  • Percentage of completion: 100%
  • Tracker bug: bz849429
  • In Fedora 18 as of initscripts 9.41-2

Detailed Description

Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals,and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.
So let's break through the artificial 8 color limit!

Also when preparing this page, while searching the net I noticed thatMac OS X Terminal's default $TERM value is xterm-256color since Lion 10.7That will ease some of the compatibility issues noted below.

You can see vim's default appearance using the above expanded palette at:

Benefit to Fedora

By having 32 times more colors available gives much better scope for using more appropriate default colors.For example, users could set their terminal backgrounds to dark or light and have ls use colorsthat are appropriate to either.

Vim Color Scheme Maker

Also more subtle and considered coloring can be used as discussed and depicted at:https://github.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized

Scope

This will be mainly configuration changes.

After some discussion around whether it was best to update each terminal to adjust the TERM environment variable,or whether to have a central config file, it was initially decided to update each terminal.But after looking more deeply into this I thought of a way to usethe simple centralized config, without causing an issue for remoteterminals logging into the system. By keying on $COLORTERM rather than $TERMwe both get accurate identification of the terminal, andnon propagation by ssh. I.E. we get to easily and centrallyconfigure this feature for particular terminals andalso avoid having to add config options to each terminalsome of which discourage new config options on principle.

Here are setting notes on setting $TERM on various terminals:Noted there was the fact that it's not configurable in gnome-terminal (vte) yet.

There is a related bug to set $TERM to 'gnome' 'gnome-256color',though we probably should stick to 'xterm' to reduce remote interop issues(ubuntu precise for example doesn't support TERM=gnome)

Here are notes on the xfce bug where it doesn't set the specified TERM correctly:http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/how-faq-forums/unreviewed-how-faq/459826-setting-term-xfce-terminal-bug-description-workaround.htmlhttps://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21007#comment94595

Mac Vim Color Scheme

Here is the current version of the /etc/profile.d/256term.sh file.

Vim

As an optional additional improvement, we could adjust the 256 color values used in ls byediting the /etc/DIR_COLORS.256color file in the coreutils package, as itdoesn't take as much advantage of the color range as it could.

As the default vim color scheme has some issues in 256 colors, we should also provide updates on this. Search, SpellLocal, ColorColumn and MatchParen are hardly readable (see :hi under vim). We should also avoid uses of bold attribute in vim highlighting as it can look bad especially at smaller font sizes.There are only a couple of uses of bold in the 256 color scheme so they can be easily avoided.Bold should be left in the vim 8 color scheme due to the effective doubling of colors that provides.

How To Test

Test as many colored terminal apps as possible under as many terminals as possible.Ensure screen works as expected too. There are screen testing notes at:http://www.robmeerman.co.uk/unix/256colours

To get the color numbers of your actual TERM, use the following:

For testing any ls color changes you can use this command:

User Experience

Better default colors with less tweaking required.

Dependencies / Affected packages

The following packages could be updated in order to auto enable or improve the 256 colors usage:

  • coreutils (for the ls color schem)
  • vim-common (to improve the vim color scheme)
  • Features/256_Color_Terminals#May_auto_support_256_colors_in_future (to add COLORTERM to the env)

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour

Documentation

Caveats

Vim
  • When connecting using 256 color xterms to other systems with SSH (which propagates the TERM environment variable), they will have to support the $TERM, or otherwise you will have a degraded experience. Debian for example traditionally didn't support xterm-256color unless the ncurses-term package was installed. Note ubuntu 12.04 at least does support xterm-256color so this is improving. Also as noted above Mac OS X 10.7 defaults to xterm-256color and so they're paving the way somewhat in this regard, so there should be less issues in connecting to older systems going forward. These points are mentioned in the release notes.

Terminal 256 color support list

Will be enabled with 256 colors automatically

  • gnome-terminal
  • konsole could be improved slightly
  • mate-terminal
  • Terminal
  • eterm
  • xterm
  • roxterm
  • terminator
  • rxvt256c (already defaults to 256 color)
  • urxvt256c (already defaults to 256 color)
  • st (already defaults to 256 color)
  • screen
  • tmux (uses screen env settings)

Don't support 256 colors

  • linux virtual console
  • tn5250
  • x3270
  • rxvt (8)
  • urxvt (88)
  • aterm

May auto support 256 colors in future

These terminals can support 256 colors but are not identifiableusing env variables. It would make sense to modify these to set COLORTERM

  • lxterminal
  • termit
  • tilda
  • sakura
  • yakuake
  • guake
  • mrxvt

Mac Vim Color Schemes

Release Notes

256 color terminals are enabled by default, which may causes minor issues when sshing to certain older systems.

This is because ssh will propagate the TERM environment variable which the remote system may not support,in which case you could receive 'unknown' or 'not fully functional' terminal status messages.

Unsetting 256 color on the remote system

The simplest way to address this issue is by setting the TERM variable back tothe widely supported xterm value.

This could be done for example by addingthe following to your ~/.profile on the remote system:

Adjusting the remote system to support 256 colors

There are often only small adjustments needed to get a remote system to support 256 colors.On older debian systems for example you just need to install the ncurses-term package.

Another option is to copy the terminfo to the remote system (per user) as documented at'running rxvt-unicode with remotes hosts'
Or you could update the remote system system wide as detailed at:'running screen-256color with RHEL 5'

Adjusting 256 color support locally

This should not be necessary, but one has the flexibility on a per user basisto adjust the $TERM environment variable as long as this is done after /etc/profile.d/*

How To Change Vim Color Scheme

For example in your ~/.bashrc after it sources /etc/bashrc you could:

Comments and Discussion

  • See Talk:Features/256_Color_Terminals