I do most of my development on a desktop, using Eclipse, but occasionally I have to log into the production machine to look at or edit files. Usually I use vi - which is an alias to Vim 7.2.
The colour scheme that Vim uses is terrible, and in some cases quite difficult to read.
Where do I set this (the colour scheme)? Is it my user profile on the remote machine? Or on my terminal on the local desktop?
You can find out which colorschemes are installed (and try them out) via :colorscheme <Tab> (or <C-D>).
If you've found a nice one, just :edit ~/.vimrc and put the corresponding command in there.
Some colorschemes look better if you have a high-color terminal. You can find out the number of available colors via :set t_Co?; you can also try increasing the number (to 256), though it's better to configure a correct value for $TERM and have Vim figure the number out by itself.
:syntax offor by configuringsyntax offin your$HOME/.vimrcfile.