Thanks for the quick help. Here are the answers to the checklist:
1. Your terminal emulator must support color.
- Does the terminal show colors for other applications?
Yes, it shows colors for 'ls -- color'
2. The TERM environment variable must be set to the type of
terminal emulator you are using.
- From a shell prompt, what does
echo $TERM
show?
$TERM = xterm
3. The terminfo database for $TERM must be correct and must
indicate that the terminal supports color.
- From a shell prompt, if you execute
infocmp
or
untic
(depending on your flavor of Unix) you should see some
cryptic looking stuff including colors#8, colors#16, or
colors#256 in the second or third line. If you don't,
then your terminfo database is telling vim that your
terminal doesn't support color.
I don't see any 'colors#' in my infocmp output. This seems to be a problem.
4. Vim must be built with a termlib that supports color.
- From withing vim, execute
:set termcap
and look for the t_Co= value. It should be the same as
the colors# from the terminfo database. If the entry is
empty or 0, then your termlib may be broken and you may need
to recompile vim (if you can) with a different termlib.
(HP-UX 10.20 has this problem.)
t_Co is blank.
Problems 3 and 4 can be worked around by following the instructions
in :help xterm-color.
I tried using set t_Sf=Esc[3%p1%dm in my vimrc file, but instead
of showing colors, it appends these characters to the keywords. For
example: Esc[32mvoid
thanks for your help again!
Sorav