vim colorschemes not changing background color

Question

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 sh

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Use this rule if you use Vim through SSH:

1. Add to your local .bashrc:

   export TERM=xterm-256color
   

2. 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'

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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:

1. echo $TERM in bash should give xterm-256color.
2. in vim, :set t_Co should give t_Co=256.