256 colors in vim
From Vim Tips Wiki
Tip 1312 Previous Next created August 23, 2006 · complexity basic · author lpenz · version 6.0
XTerm and most other modern terminal emulaters support 256 colors, you can use a script to check if your terminal supports 256 colors.
To enable colors on XTerm you will need to run the configure scripts with the --enable-256-color switch, in addition you may also need to set your TERM environment variable to xterm-256color.
For bourne shells (bash, zsh, pdksh) this is done in ~/.profile:
set TERM xterm-256color; export TERM
Or for csh shells this is done in ~/.cshrc:
setenv TERM xterm-256color
See http://frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/ for more information about 256 colors on XTerm
To enable 256 colors in vim, put this your .vimrc before setting the colorscheme:
set t_Co=256
You may also need to add:
set t_AB=^[[48;5;%dm set t_AF=^[[38;5;%dm
Your colors should at least look a little different. For full effect, use a colorscheme that supports 256 colors like desert256 (script#1243), inkpot (script#1143) or gardener (script#1348).
[edit] References
[edit] See also
- http://frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/
- colorschemedegrade script, converts any GUI-only colorscheme to 256 colors; GUI version of VIM is required.
- View all colors available to gvim describes how to list available color names and numbers
[edit] Comments
Setting $TERM in the shell profile is generally a bad idea, since you may wish to use different terminals. It is preferable to add it to .Xdefaults (or similar file read by X applications):
XTerm*termName: xterm-256color
Also, if the terminfo file is correct, there's no need to set 't_Co' in Vim. It will ask the terminal for that value. (Spiiph 11:39, 11 August 2009 (UTC))
