Why does .vimrc not set colorscheme properly?

Question

So I have downloaded proton.vim (a colorscheme) and placed it inside my .vim/colors folder.

In .vimrc, right at the bottom I have

colorscheme proton

but when Vim loads, it is set to the default colorscheme. If I type

:colorscheme proton

after it has loaded, it works fine though. Anyone know what else I need to do to persist this colorscheme?

Answer 1

Try this to help troubleshoot the issue:

1. Check the location where you have downloaded the color proton.vim file.

   On Linux, the system default will be something like /usr/share/vim/vim74/colors/

   On MSWindows, the system default will be something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vim74\colors\

   You could also try setting up a home directory for colors: $HOME/.vim/colors on Linux, or $HOME/vimfiles/colors on MSWindows.

2. See if the color scheme shows up outside of your ~/.vimrc

   Restart vim, then per this StackOverflow post, type

   :colorscheme then Space followed by CTRLd

   This should list your colorscheme along with all other color schemes.

Note: CTRLd returns one list which shows all color schemes.

If you use :colorscheme then Space followed by TAB you will iterate over the list of color schemes, one at a time, each time you press TAB

You can also see this behaviour if you use :colorscheme then Space followed by CTRLi ; you will iterate over the list of color schemes, one at a time, each time you press CTRLi

When I troubleshoot an issue like this, I prefer CTRLd so I may see the entire list at once.

3. type

   :let colors_name

   to return the name of the current colorscheme in use by vim

4. If you've added it to ~/.vimrc

   to confirm which .vimrc file is being loaded by vim, type

   :scriptnames

   This will show you the path to the .vimrc, the path to the current colorscheme loaded, and all scripts sourced so far.

   This file will be ~\_vimrc on MSWindows.

Answer 2

Check whether the color scheme's name is mentioned properly, for case sensitivity. Also, check whether

let colors_name = "name"

is found or not. If not, add this line and try again.

Answer 3

I had this problem when the colorscheme name (as in let g:colors_name = "selenized" inside colorscheme file) contained uppercase letters. Changing it to lowercase fixed the problem.