why is the material theme looking all weird on my vim

Question

so this is a case where the toy doesn't look like what's advertised on the box. I tried to install the material-theme on my vim, which should be a standard exercise. However this is what it looks like on my vim:

as opposed to what's advertised here:

vim colors content:

~/.vim/colors $ ls -1
guardian.vim
hybrid.vim
material-theme.vim
molokai.vim
molokaicpp.vim
molokaiyo.vim
molokaiyo_matlab.vim
molokaiyo_r.vim
molokaiyo_tex.vim
molokaiyophp.vim
monokai.vim
monokambat.vim
slate2.vim
sweyla988775.vim
two2tango.vim
wombat.vim
zenburn.vim

vim syntax files:

~/.vim/syntax $ ls -1
html.vim
java.vim
json.vim
matlab.vim
php.vim
python.vim
r.vim
rmd.vim
tex.vim

what am I missing?

update

it works after trying on macvim! however it's a bitter sweet feeling.. b/c i'm so used to working on vim from within the terminal.. having to launch a new app for vim almost defeats the purpose of using vim the first place for me.. so not sure what to do next.

Answer 1

Looking through the color settings in the theme, it's only defining the full color range for the GUI, and is using the default 16 terminal colors. Your screen shot appears to be using fairly standard terminal colors, so I am going to assume that you are running in a terminal. If you are editing local files, the easiest way to get the full color scheme would be to switch from vim to gvim. (If you are using the default install of vim on a Linux desktop, you may need to install one of the GUI packages.)

If you have to run in a terminal, and your terminal supports 256 colors, you may be able to approximate the colors by converting the theme. This works better for some themes than for others, because 256 colors is still a lot fewer than the ~16 million available to the GUI. Getting 256 color terminal support if you don't have it set up already is a whole topic unto itself, but there is some good advice in the vim wiki here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/256_colors_in_vim

(Short version: If your terminal capabilities are configured correctly, :set t_Co=256 should be sufficient. If not, you may be in for a crash course in one of the most arcane subjects in modern computing.)

From there, there are several plugins that will attempt to convert a GUI theme to a 256 color theme. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_GUI_color_settings_in_a_terminal has some instructions for how to use guicolorscheme or CSApprox. I haven't used either of these in a very long time, so I can't comment on their relative merits.