Gvim : Statusline is loading but not its colours

Question

I have been experimenting with colours for my statusline recently and I put the plugin file in the bundle directory. I use pathogen which loads everything up from that directory. But, Even though the status line plugin is getting sourced, the colours are not appearing.

When I manually source the file from GVim it adds all the colours but its not doing this automatically when the plugin loads up. This is happening only in Gvim. Vim in Powershell and Cygwin that use the same plugin show the statusline colours properly when they start up.

What could be the reason for this and what can I change in the plugin to get it working in gvim?

Edit: I have the following line for the colorscheme in my gvimrc, when I remove it from gvimrc and add it in vimrc, everything works fine.

colorscheme solarized

Github link for the plugin's source - Vim Streamline

Answer 1

The problem is that there are various scenarios in which Vim will reload the colour scheme such as using :colorscheme or :syntax enable.

Colour schemes should always start with :highlight clear to clear all existing highlight groups. Why? See what happens when you do:

:highlight Test ctermfg=red
:highlight Test ctermbg=blue

What is Test now set to?

---

To fix this, you should always hook in to the ColorScheme autocommand when you define highlight groups:

fun! s:highlight()
    highlight Foo ctermbg=red
endfun

augroup myplugin_highlight
  autocmd!
  autocmd ColorScheme * call s:highlight()
augroup end
call s:highlight()

I used a function because we want to run this both on startup and when the ColorScheme autocommand is fired.

It's a bit ugly, but it's the only way.

---

The reason this breaks when putting colorscheme inside gvimrc, but not vimrc, is because of the load order. In :help startup we can see that:

• Loading the vimrc is step 3
• Loading plugins is step 4
• Loading gvimrc is step 8.

So the gvimrc file will override plugins, but vimrc won't. This is also why you shouldn't put things like g:some_plugin_setting in the gvimrc file.