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When I use MacVim, all the color schemes work and looks very rich in the window.

But when I fire up my Terminal and use Vi inside it, the color schemes look very very bad. Is there any setting/config I should set to let Terminal Vi use all the colors available by a color scheme.

Update: I use

MacOSX Lion Terminal v2.2 with xterm-color Vim 7.3 

Thanks

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  • You need to configure your Terminal to use 256 colors. Do you use iTerm2 or Terminal? What version of Mac OS X do you use? What version of Vim? Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 8:28
  • I switched to xterm256 .. but there is a lot of difference between MacVim and Vim-inside-terminal Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 9:25

3 Answers 3

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You probably can't do this. It's not Vim's fault, it's your terminal's fault. The GUI has access to millions of colours and terminals generally have access to 256 (or much less, depending on your terminal). It just doesn't have the guts to show the same colours as the GUI version. That's also why all of the colour schemes for Vim have values for the GUI (e.g. guibg) and values for the terminal (e.g ctermbg). There's a GUI value for the powerful side, and a terminal value for the weak side.

This is one of the reasons why I only use the GUI version. You can easily marry the command line with Vim so that using a single GUI version is much easier. You can check out a video on how to do this at vimeo and I recently created a plugin for ZSH that makes it even easier, which you can get from Github

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3 Comments

I login to a remote server and code in there. So I have to ssh in to the server and do my code work.. in which I guess I'm left with no choice except VIM inside terminal
Then live with the colours, dood :)
Or, you know what you could try... Edit the files in MacVim via the SCP connection. Have a look at :help netrw-start
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If configure your .vimrc with the command

set t_Co=256 

you are configuring vim to allow colorschemes that use 256 colors. Maybe MacVim uses this configuration by default.

Comments

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I'd advise trying CSApprox

On OS X especially you can get very good results for console Vim.

I use it on OS X, Debian & Fedora with good results for console Vim & Matt who wrote the plugin, is a very helpful guy & will do his best to get the best results possible for you if you run into problems.

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