VIM colors in terminal look very dry

Question

I've been trying out a few different vim color schemes but none of them ever look like the picture (they seem very dry, not as colorful). I have tried messing with all the "profile preferences" on terminal but they don't seem to fix the color issue. I'm on Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

The ANSI X3.64 standard only specifies 16 colors, and it's what Xterm declares in its terminfo description for "xterm". (GNOME Terminal is Xterm-compatible and uses the same terminfo description too.)

Current versions of both Xterm and GNOME Terminal have a 256-color mode. Since most programs use terminfo to decide whether to use 256 colors, you need to set $TERM apropriately. For example, if it was xterm, change it to xterm-256color.

export TERM="xterm-256color"

Restart vim after running this command.

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One way to do this permanently is to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

case $TERM in
    xterm|screen)
        TERM="${TERM}-256color" ;;
esac

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Inside vim, you can use :set t_Co? to check whether it successfully detected 256 color mode. Do not change this value inside your .vimrc, though, as it would be very unreliable.

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Of course, nothing can beat gvim, which as a graphical program can use the full 32-bit color range.