How do I turn vi colors off? I was using vim-tiny on on Ubuntu 14.04. Installed vim-nox. Version is version 7.4.52. Once I installed that, I got all these syntax colors by default. I have my Terminal set to a black background with bright green text. Now when I use vi with the colors, some of the text is unreadable against the dark background. I would rather just turn the colors off. How do I do this?
You can use:
:set t_Co=0
This will tell Vim that you're not using a colour terminal. The difference with using :syntax off is that this will still enable some syntax highlighting features with bold, underlined, and "reverse video".
answered Apr 3 '16 at 4:48
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1Hmm... I think I still want to see bold. I think I was able to see bold and some other formats with vim-tiny, so I wouldn't want to completely lose functionality. Thanks for your helpful answer. – gracious1 Apr 3 '16 at 9:22
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@gracious1 This will enable bold/underline,
:syntax off*won't. ;-) – Martin Tournoij Apr 3 '16 at 13:46 -
Just discovered this after viewing /etc/vim/vimrc for the first time. Uncommenting the line "set background=dark" in vimrc solves my readability problem also. It changes the syntax colors so that they are distinguishable against my black background! This is actually better than what I had hoped for in the original question!
(Presumably :set background=dark would have worked, too? Or something like that?)
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1Yes,
:set background=darkwould have worked. You could add that to~/.vimrcor~/.vim/vimrcas well, instead of modifying files in/etc. – muru Apr 3 '16 at 14:44
You can disable syntax highlighting by doing:
:syntax off
To turn it back on:
:syntax enable
:colorand tab through the possible arguments. I use a black background for my terminal (with gray text) and I personally like thedeserttheme. – Shahbaz Apr 3 '16 at 5:26/etc/vim/vimrchassyntax on. – Martin Tournoij Apr 3 '16 at 13:48/etc/vim/vimrcdoesn't. Looks like @Carpetsmoker was right. – muru Apr 3 '16 at 14:29