Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.

I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.

Hum... After your edit, can you check if the vim colour theme is properly defined for terminals?

Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.

I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.

Hum... After your edit, can you check if the vim colour theme is properly defined for terminals?

Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.

I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.

Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.

I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.

Hum... After your edit, can you check if the vim colour theme is properly defined for terminals?