You have to run the script when your shell starts and it has to be ran from the base16-vim
color scheme, which is tersely documented in base16-shell
. But, you don't want to use that script. It'll just create more confusion later.
The "base 16" colors are the 8 standard colors + 8 brighter variants of those colors. base16
's themes treat them as 16 distinct colors instead. All shell programs that use color expect these colors to be what's labeled below, but have no idea what the actual color is on your screen.

Using base16
is fine if you're using a profile dedicated to Vim. Otherwise, you will get non-obvious results if you use other programs that have no awareness of this. For instance, if a program only uses the basic 8 colors and wants to display "bright green", it'll show up on your screen as a very dark gray, which won't be visible if you have a black background.
If your terminal supports palette customization (it does), the base16-shell
script allows you to keep the standard 8 colors + 8 bright variants, but at the cost of changing five of the the 216 color palette. In the base16
Vim colorscheme, it will use colors 0-7
and 17-21
, instead of 0-15
.
Colors 17-21
are shades of blue, which is shown in the troubleshooting section of the README:

Colors 16-231
are a fixed set of colors and programs that use this palette expect these colors to be constant. So, you'll also get unexpected results if 17-21
are used by anything other than Vim, which again, is fine if you are fully aware of this and use a separate profile just for Vim.
This was a clever approach, but IMO, gives little guidance to users and is far too much effort to alter a well established palette to get a pretty color scheme. For a little bit less effort, you can get the latest build of Vim (v7.4.1799+) or Neovim (v0.1.5 [dev]) and use the termguicolors
setting to use the #rrggbb
GUI colors instead since iTerm2 supports truecolor. Then you wouldn't be limited to 256 colors and can use any of the base16-vim
color schemes without screwing up the shell's colors.