Vim tip: fixing the light-background color schemes
I use a light background for my X terminals (xterm and rxvt): not white, but a light grey that I find easy on the eyes. Long ago, I spent the time to set up a custom vim color scheme that works with the light background.
But sometimes I need to
run vim somewhere where I don't have access to my custom scheme.
It always starts up with a lot of the words displayed in
yellow, completely unreadable against a light background.
:set background=light
doesn't help -- the default colorscheme is already intended for a
light background, yet it still uses yellow characters.
I tried all the colorschemes installed with ubuntu's vim
(you can get a list of them with ls /usr/share/vim/vim71/colors
).
The only light-background vim schemes that don't use yellow
all have their primary text color as red. Do a lot of people
really want to edit red text? Maybe the same people who think that
yellow is a dark color?
Curiously, it turns out that if you use one of these light color schemes on a Linux console (with its black background), the yellow text isn't yellow (which would show up fine against black), but orange (which would be better on a light background).
Mikael knew the answer:
:set t_Co=88
This tells vim to use 88-color mode instead of its default of 8, and the yellow text turns light blue. Not terrifically readable but much better than yellow. Or, instead, try
:set t_Co=256and the yellow/light blue text turns an ugly, but readable, orange (probably the same orange as the console used).
So, vim users with dark-on-light terminal schemes: add
set t_Co=256
in your .vimrc (no colon)
and you'll be much happier.
Update: Pádraig Brady has a great page explaining more about
terminal
colour highlights, including a
The only catch: on Ubuntu you do have to install the
ncurses-term package, which will get you xterm-256color as
well as 256color variants for lots of other terminal types.
Here's useful page on 256-Color
XTerms in Ubuntu.
TERM=xterm-256color
setting to get
vim to use 256 colors automatically. There's also a lot of good advice
there on enabling colors in other console apps.
[ 22:29 Mar 22, 2009 More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]