Make vim show all the colors

Question

I have a problem with making vim show a colorscheme fully (like in gvim). I've read about how to enable 256 color mode in terminal and it vim, but somehow it just doesn't work. The state of now is:

:echo &t_Co returns 256

[~]$ tput colors
256
[~]$ echo $TERM
xterm-256color

Colortest shows all the colors:

But yet, vim doesn't show grey20 color of the colorscheme, instead using the terminal background. I also tried changing it to grey without success:

The system is ubuntu 14.04. and the terminal gnome terminal, although I've tried with terminator and tmux, with no success.

Any idea what could gone wrong?

Answer 1

The colorscheme must be missing cterm definitions, the full highlight command should look like:

hi Normal cterm=NONE ctermfg=15 ctermbg=7 gui=NONE guifg=White guibg=grey20

If your terminal supports 256 colors, you might need color codes greater than 16.

If you have a true color terminal, you could add these settings instead to enable 24-bit compatibility:

set termguicolors

" Correct RGB escape codes for vim inside tmux
if !has('nvim') && $TERM ==# 'screen-256color'
  let &t_8f = "\<Esc>[38;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"
  let &t_8b = "\<Esc>[48;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"
endif

From the help for 'termguicolors':

Note that the cterm attributes are still used, not the gui ones.

Read more:

• :h highlight-args
• :h cterm-colors
• Vim Tip 256 colors in vim