Colorscheme's background not correct in terminal

Question

I imported the solarized colorscheme and palette. My terminal has the correct colors and background, gvim has the correct colors and background, but vim has an incorrectly colored background. The text is all correct, but the background appears to be pure black.

Here is my .vimrc:

syntax enable

if has('gui_running')
    set background=dark
else
    set background=dark
endif

:set t_Co=256
let g:solarized_termcolors=256
colorscheme solarized

If anyone has any suggestions on what could be causing this, I would be much obliged. I run xubuntu with the default terminal.

I should also mention that the light option results in a very yellow background for Vim.

Answer 1

There's two reasons why I think this may be happening:

1. The solarized color scheme you are using does not declare ctermfg and ctermbg for any of the features you want to highlight. Try out this color scheme, should look essentially the same both inside your terminal and gvim, if this is the case then you may need to look into using a color scheme that declares ctermfg and ctermbg.

2. You may need to make sure your terminal emulator supports the colors you are trying to display:

   • Ensure that the file ncurses-term package (which provides the file /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm+256color) is installed.

   • Set the value of your TERM environment variable by running

     export TERM=xterm+256colors
     

     at the shell.

   • Then start vim in that shell.

---

Note that both of this things could be happening at the same time, but it is hard to diagnose this without more information about your system.

Answer 2

Great news, everyone. @Tom and @Rich set me on the right path. I found a solution provided here. I set my .vimrc to the simple

syntax enable
set background=dark
set t_Co=16
colorscheme solarized

This seems to fix everything. The colors don't seem to be as bright in the font examples, but that could very well just be me. To anyone who wants to use the Solarized colorscheme and uses xfce4-terminal, just changing the terminalrc and the .vimrc seemed to solve my main problems. Thanks to everyone for your help!

Answer 3

I guess it is an issue of compatibility of this colorscheme with terminal. The plugin csaprox miraculously solve a bunch of this issues.

Synopsis:

It's hard to find colorschemes for terminal Vim. Most colorschemes are written to only support GVim, and don't work at all in terminal Vim.

This plugin makes GVim-only colorschemes Just Work in terminal Vim, as long as the terminal supports 88 or 256 colors - and most do these days. This usually requires no user interaction (but see the help for what to do if things don't Just Work). After getting this plugin happily installed, any time you use :colorscheme it will do its magic and make the colorscheme Just Work.

Links to the plugin:

• vim.org
• Github

Answer 4

The solarized terminal-Vim colorscheme can work in one of two different ways.

1. A 16-colour mode: Solarized only contains 16 colours, so in this mode you set your terminal to use the solarized colours as its 16 colours, and the Vim colorscheme just uses these. So for example, the Vim colorscheme will request terminal colour "1", and the terminal displays this as the hex colour #dc322f.

2. A 256-colour mode, where it picks the closest matches for its 16 colours from a 256-color palette.

The former method is strongly recommended by the author (and by me), and it sounds as though you are happy to use this method because you state that your "terminal has the correct colors and background".

However, it appears from your screenshot that your terminal does not have the correct colours set. (White is not a colour in the solarized set, and although I haven't eyedroppered it, the other text colour in the screenshot doesn't look to me like it's Solarized "Violet" (#6c71c4), either.)

If you remove the lines setting t_Co and g:solarized_termcolors from your vimrc*, and configure your terminal colours correctly, then you should find that the 16-colour solarized colorscheme will start to work.

_{* These lines switch solarized to using its (less faithful) 256-colour mode. This should also work, (I suspect that @Jubal is correct in suggesting that BCE is the problem here), but the 16-colour mode is preferable unless you explicitly don't want to use solarized in your terminal.}

Answer 5

Seems like you found your answer. I had this same problem and nothing above worked. What worked for me was using altercation's terminalrc, as opposed to sgerrand's.

My relevant vimrc is simply:

syntax enable
set background=dark
colorscheme solarized

Hope that helps someone!

Answer 6

So this is what works for me (on all terminals I used to use – xterm, konsole, gnome-terminal, iterm2, roxterm – on both Linux and OS X, also with gvim and macvim):

" no other configuration than this needed for solarized
colorscheme solarized
highlight SpecialKey ctermfg=11 ctermbg=8

if &term =~ '256color'
  " Disable Background Color Erase (BCE) so that color schemes work
  " properly within 256-color terminals
  set t_ut=
endif

Answer 7

This was a pain to get working (I use terminal Vim in Linux Mint), and unfortunately I didn't write down the specifics of everything I did. Here is the relevant section of my vimrc:

syntax enable
set background=dark
set t_Co=16
colo solarized

It may also be worth checking out this project on GitHub.

Answer 8

What worked for me was to remove this part of your settings

if has('gui_running')
   set background=dark
else
   set background=dark
endif

I am running a xfce4-terminal

Answer 9

I had this problem too with xfce-terminal.

After a bit of research, I discovered this bug: anything you set as $TERM in your XFCE terminal is silently ignored.

I think this is really a bug of the underlying (and unmaintained) old VTE library that XFCE terminal (still GTK+2 based) uses. Switching to a GTK+3 terminal, that implicitely uses the new VTE library, solved the issue.