Does anyone know how to highlight spelling errors?

Question

While using gVim on my Windows 10 machine at work, I discovered and started using the amazing spell checker when writing markdown. In gVim, misspelled words are underlined with the red squiggly everyone is familiar with.

At home on my Ubuntu machine, I realized the red squiggly only works in gVim, not in my terminal. I looked through the help files and it sounds like highlighting is the default way vim points out spelling errors. Yet, none of my misspelled words are highlighted. This is a problem for me because although I have gVim installed on this machine, a prefer to use vim in the terminal.

I have tried starting vim without my config file and the spell check does work (it highlights bad words). When I start vim with my config, it does not highlight words, even when I enter :set spell.

vim version: 8.0
vim plugins: surround.vim,solarized.vim
terminal: Xfce Terminal
current contents of vimrc

Update:

Spell-check highlighting works when I comment-out colorscheme solarized in my vimrc. So the problem is probably with that color plugin. I still have no idea how to fix it though.

Answer 1

Since I (or rather the Community Bot) dug this question up after two years, I might as well offer a minimal and elegant answer to have the solarized colorscheme, running in the terminal, with spell checking.

Only one line is needed in addition to the usual solarized setup in .vimrc:

colorscheme solarized
if has('gui_running')
    set background=light
else
    " Tell Vim the terminal cannot draw squiggly underlines,
    " fall back to straight ones
    set t_Cs=
    set background=dark
endif

The effect is that misspelled words are underlined with a straight line.

This answer is condensed from the discussion of the following bugs:

solarized.vim #195 (not to blame)

vim #2424 (the root cause)

Answer 2

After reading more of the solarized documentation, it's now clear that I should not be using solarized.vim with this terminal emulator. Instead, I should use the emulator's settings to change its color scheme to solarized, and leave vim alone. Now I am only using solarized.vim with gVim and spell checking is working correctly in both versions.