This afternoon a coworker who used vim in a terminal heavily complained that he hated the 16-color schemes that vim used. So we converted him to gvim in order to get him better color schemes like Hans' desert scheme. Along the way, I thought, surely terminal emulators in this day and age support more than 16 colors. Sure enough they do. I discovered this page, which I will share with you:
http://www.frexx.de/xterm-256-notes/ Apparently gnome-terminal and konsole both should work fine with 256 colors (in any modern distro anyway). There is even a link there to a desert256 color scheme! After trying it out, I couldn't get it to work. I have to manually tell vim about the colors: :set t_Co=256 Then it works. The color scheme itself is smart enough to check the colors, but vim apparently doesn't detect that 256 colors are available, so it never sets the variable. Hence the scheme doesn't run. Can any one tell me a better way in my vimrc to really detect it, say I'm running with TERM set to "xterm" and then force it to 256 colors? And if someone wants to help me hack the desert256.vim file to set the background to grey instead of black, that'd be cool too! My vimrc-foo is pretty weak. cheers, Michael, who is busily recompiling elinks to take advantage of 256 colors! /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */