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Basically, all I'm trying to do is enable the syntax option.
syntax enable
colorscheme cobalt2
For some reason, I get no errors if I comment out the first line, but in case I don't comment it, I get:
Error detected while processing /usr/share/vim/vim81/syntax/synload.vim:
line 19:
E185: Cannot find color scheme 'cobalt'
which is not exactly the name of the theme that I'm trying to use.
Any ideas why this would be happening?
It's important that a theme set the g:colors_name variable correctly to match the name of the theme script file, because Vim will use it when it needs to reload the theme (and it does so in a few situations.)
I could find at least one cobalt2 theme online that had a commit fixing it from incorrectly setting the variable to cobalt, to setting it correctly as cobalt2.
See this commit, which is the latest commit in theme cobalt2 available as Vim package GertjanReynaert/cobalt2-vim-theme.
It's the latest commit of that repo, but it's dated of over five years ago, 2015, so I'm not sure how you would end up with that repo but an older version of that...
In any case, try to update your cobalt2 theme to the latest. If you're already on the latest, look inside the colors/cobalt2.vim script inside it and see how it sets colors_name. If it sets it incorrectly, you can fix it there (and hopefully report it to the maintainer of the source where you got it, so it can be fixed there too.)
syntax enableis commented out, do you still get any colorscheme when you open a file in ViM? If you dols /usr/share/vim/vim81/colors, that will display a list of all available color schemes you have available to you. Maybe double check the one you want exists?cobalt2exists and I'm able to apply it after commenting out thesyntax enableas mentioned above.synload.vim, line 19 isexe "colors " . colors_name. Since I don't have the cobalt color scheme, when I'm in vim and I type:colors cobaltI get the same error you see. I did a grep for the variablecolors_namein/usr/share/vim/vim81and got all the colors .vim files defining that global variable. Can you confirm that your/usr/share/vim/vim81/colors/cobalt2.vimdefines thecolors_namevariable ascobalt2?