Neovim has wrong background setting

Question

I'm having a trouble with Neovim colors when using my vimrc file as Neovim's init.vim.

Here's the expected look, how it looks in Vim:

And here is how it looks in Neovim:

I guess that's because of the :set background? shows:

background=dark

although it's obviously light and it's set as set background=light in the init.vim file.

Answer 1

The background setting actually doesn't control the background colors but more the foregrounds colors. It dates from a time (that includes the present for some terminal) where the background couldn't be controlled.

It is a way to tell the colorscheme or Vim in general what kind of color should be selected to offer a good contrast with the background (i.e. select light foreground color if the background is dark, select dark foreground color if the background is `light).

Remark: about the reason for which the sequence of the background option setting and the colorscheme settings is important is the following line of the default colorscheme:

set bg&

It resets the background option to its default which is dark.

Answer 2

The reason was that the order of options in the init.vim file is important.

Originally it was:

set background=light
colorscheme default

I changed it to

colorscheme default
set background=light

And it started to look correctly. Don't know if that's specified in the docs.