I've spent a bunch of time going over my Vim and Tmux configurations lately, trying to refine my workflow and I have come across a (small but annoying) problem that is stumping me. I am currently using OSX, but I have had the same issue with Windows' terminal/powershell.
My issue is that I am unable to change the brown color that appears in the default vim syntax highlighting which is used many of the languages that I write in. The color that I am speaking of can be seen in this vim colortest:
In the default OSX terminal (and in powershell) you can set the ANSI colors via terminal preferences, however, the brown color is not included in the GUI configuration options. This results in some ugly syntax highlighting that does not fit in with my desired color scheme:
My question is, what is the most portable way to change this default color? I would love to be able to do something in my .vimrc that would just work around this ugly color so I don't have to reconfigure colors for any system that I might be on, but I understand this might not be possible. Another route would be changing the syntax highlighting colors, but my investigations into that have so been unfruitful.
Thanks!
Appedix:
Colors selected in OSX profile for screenshots:
Sadly, the default Vim colorscheme is not as tidy as one would hope. In this case, Brown is a bit of a "catchall" name that ends up being interpreted differently in different contexts.
In GUI Vim, Brown refers to the "Brown" in X11's rgb.txt: #A52A2A.
In TUI Vim with &t_Co == 256, you get #af5f00, AKA 130 in the "xterm palette".
In TUI Vim with &t_Co == 16 or &t_Co == 8, you get your terminal palette's "Yellow", AKA 3.
By the looks of it, you seem to be affected by the second case.
While there exist ways to change the so-called "xterm palette" wholesale, you will have a hard time changing that specific color in a straightforward, non-messy way.
What you can do…
Do :set background=dark to force Vim to use a different set of default colors that doesn't include "Brown".
Choose a built-in or third-party colorscheme that doesn't use that specific color.
Override the Statement highlight group as explained in this gist with whatever color you want from the xterm palette.
Related
Looking for a way to control text/cursor highlighting colors when in vi-mode in tmux. I can not seem to find many answers from googling around. I love tmux and use this feature quite a bit, and I have been living with this flaw for some time and still have not been able to find a solution. You can view my dotfiles here. Keep in mind that my master branch is my OSX setup, and I have an "arch" branch for my Arch linux setup. The issues occurs on both systems. Though the colors are slightly different, but not by much.
Here is current symptoms: (both systems) I am in a tmux session, I want to enter into vi-mode for either searching or copying some text. When copying text (hitting v while in vi-mode for visual) the highlighted text and background are both black. So I can't see the text I am highlighting. Or while searching (hit "/" while in vi-mode for searching) my background and text on the entire line where my prompt is for typing the text I want to search is all black. So I have no idea what text is actually in the search. If I mis-type something due to fat fingers and nothing returns in my search, it can be frustrating. One last symptom (which is a minor one, but would be nice to solve) When I do search, I get absolutely no highlighting over than my normal cursor. Not like my vim set up where it highlights currently found, and all other matches.
Here is what the desired fix would look like: Searches would highlight in some shade of yellow or orange on all matched text. Searching prompt to type in search text would be at least readable. Anything but Black on Black. Highlighting text while selecting what to copy in visual mode again anything readable, no Black on Black.
Other things to note: I typically have mouse-mode on in tmux to promote keyboard-driven approach and not allow any selection of text via mouse selection. But when I do toggle this feature off and can then select text via mouse, the highlighted text background is white and text is black. While readable, would still wish to know how to control this color as well. Also (not sure any vim settings actually carry over to tmux) but everything works as desired while actually in vim. Just in case vim settings here. Same note about branches.
Most of my tools are latest versions afaik. This includes Tmux 2.1. I do not have full list of versions of my tools as of right now. If this may play a part in debugging let me know and I'll reply with versions. For what its worth other tools that might be in conflict is my shell I use zsh with on-my-zsh. On my mac I am using iTerm2, on arch I'm using URxvt. Doubt any of my .Xresources matter since it also happens on OSX.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
For reference purposes: I am using a Macbook Pro Retina (2014) and all software is up to date as of the time I am posting this question. (Using OSX 10.10.2 Yosemite)
I have been struggling for the past few days as I attempted to customized the Terminal window. Everything was going fine... until I decided I only wanted to change the color for the text that you are currently typing (text input) which will then be executed.
I have no problems getting into my .bash_profile and adjusting anything. I simply cannot seem to grasp the color concept well enough such that it only does this one thing for me. Currently my .bash_profile looks like this:
export PS1="\n\n\njboned$ "
export PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. As a sidenote: I understand the 8-bit snippets used to represent the individual colors, however it seems I cannot figure out how to use them to address only the text input only.
To do what you are asking, these steps would be needed:
at the end of the prompt, turn on the text color which you want to show
when you press return (to complete editing) turn the text-color off.
bash does not reset attributes while you edit, so the color "should" work — while editing. As you edit, bash is likely to use escape sequences which clear the current line (which may fill it with whatever background color you have selected).
The real problem is how to reset the colors when you press Enter. That does not appear to have a straightforward solution: I do not see a way to rebind the Enter key to add features—no distinction is made between levels of interpretation, and you may not find it possible to enhance the Enter key. The key binding feature in bash talks mainly to the readline library; leftovers are sent to bash. In a binding you may be able to do these things:
send the name of a macro to bash, or a full echo command which resets colors (since readline has no echo of its own, it seems)
the Enter key (i.e., ^M), and
to readline directly, the accept-line function
Alternatively, what you could do is bind another key, say control/L to do the bash accept-line function as well as resetting color. Here are a couple of links which you would find useful to investigate how to do this:
how to bind the 'Enter key'
Complex keybinding in bash
In bash, how do I bind a function key to a command?
Smart preparsing with the bash shell
When text is highlighted in vim, for example using the 'em' tag when writing a HTML document, I find that in some color schemes the cursor becomes invisible, making it difficult to correctly place the closing tag. Is there a way to have the cursor change color over highlighted text?
Change color of cursor in gvim
Look at both answers sir, I think you'll have your answer in there....
You'd have to hook into the CursorMoved,CursorMovedI events and then determine the highlight group under the cursor with synIDattr(synIDtrans(synID(line("."), col("."), 1)), "name"). If it's one of those diffcult-to-see groups, you can issue a :highlight Cursor ... command to change it (or else change it back).
But this is rather complicated. Why don't you simply modify the colorscheme and choose a color that is easily recognized under all circumstances?! (The :hi command lists all colors and helps you choose one.)
This problem led me down quite a rabbit hole and caused me to learn a lot more about how syntax highlighting works than intended.
I learned that the reason my, supposedly italic, text was highlighted in the first place, is because the Mac terminal doesn't support italics ("Enabling italics in vim syntax highlighting for mac terminal")
I realised, thanks to "Colour colour everywhere! 256 colour-mode for Linux consoles", that due to the color profile I had chosen in Terminal's preferences, my "bright" and "normal" colors showed no difference, and for that reason my color profiles never looked like the screenshots.
And, finally, I solved my cursor getting lost problem by changing the cursor color in the Terminal preferences.
I use vim on webfaction through putty and would like to change the colours used in the syntax highlighting. I have installed some example themes and then tried to change the colors in those themes to match the ones I want. For some reason this strategy does not work. What am I doing wrong? Is it because I'm using putty, or is it something weird with webfaction's linux or vim? Or is my logic just wrong?
I created /home/user/.vim/color/theme.vim
I then load the them by adding colorscheme theme to my /home/user/.vimrc
Aside from my color changes not working on obvious parts like
hi Normal guifg=#ffffff guibg=#000000 gui=none
it also does not seem to implement all the theme changes when I just use the theme without changing it. Is there something better than putty I can use?
In terminal mode, the ctermbg and ctermfg keys are used instead of guibg and guifg. It uses Xterm colors. See for example this table for a rough mapping, and even a VIM script that shows a color table.
So you would need to change your line to:
hi Normal ctermfg=15 ctermbg=0 guifg=#ffffff guibg=#000000 gui=none
I want to know if it's possible to detect available colors in terminal which vim was called, so I could select different colorschemes for each color situation.
This is different from checking &t_Co variable. Sometimes I open a vim with 8 colors, and can set t_Co=256 to use some colorschemes, but sometimes (Like in Terminal.app in mac), setting this variable doesn't throw an error but the t_Co isn't changed because Terminal.app's color limit is 16.
Fact is: I only know this limit by experience, I would like to know if it's possible to know this value from calling a function (if terminal_supports > 256) or something like that.
Can I do it using just viml functions, or I would need to create some bash scripts and call them from vimrc for example? I would like to have this information in Linux, Mac and Windows (also, using Cygwin).
(If I, for some reason, can't get this information from the system, is there a table or in vim help some information about different terminals and their color capabilities? If so, then I could create a hash table with all terminals and ther colors capabilities.)
Another try: some information is here, if you haven't found it already, including informative link at bottom of the linked page:
256_colors_in_vim
So far as I know Vim gets the t_Co number from termcap. So if you can get value from termcap to accurately reflect max colors supported then you're set. I think that's what the info in linked page does, at least for 256 color terms. . .