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.
Related
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.
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've been using BBEdit for years, but I've just started using TextMate because I find it has better support for Ruby on Rails than BBEdit (please don't start a flame-war over this!).
One thing I really miss is that BBEdit can add 1/2 or 1/1 page of empty space below the document (without adding lines to the actual document). This means that I will never have to write code at the very bottom of the window/screen, but I can always scroll the page to get the current line at a comfortable hight on the screen, even if it is the last line in the document.
Now, this might seem minor, but after using TextMate for a few days, missing this feature is really starting to bug me.
On the off chance that there is a setting I missed, or that there is a plugin or something out there, I thought I'd throw the question out here. If you know of any way to replicate this behaviour in TextMate, please share!
There is now an option in TextMate 2 to scroll past the end of the document.
This might be rather a late answer but i am posting b/c this question is high in google. Looking for the same issue i found:
PageFeed
PageFeed is a TextMate plugin that allows one to scroll past the last line of a document.
Its not perfect but for most cases its all you need: https://github.com/ampt/PageFeed
I don't think I've ever witnessed a flame war involving BBEdit.
No, TextMate doesn't allow that.
You could create a macro/snippet to add a bunch of \n at the bottom of the file.
Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text all allow this and have better RoR support than BBEdit.
Lacking a scrolling margin, especially at the bottom, when searching in text, is the most frustraing thing in Notepad, Word, Excel, etc. and is enough by itself to make me hate the products on almost a daily basis. EDT, TPU, etc, were great text editors which had this feature (maybe they introduced it) and, now that I've found Emacs emulates them, I use it all the time, and text editing life is good again. I can't understand how most of the world accepts the crazy situation of using a text editor that is worse than those in vogue 20 years ago.
For those who aren't clear about the concept or benefits of a scrolling bottom margin, it is not just about adding empty space below the document, but it also lets you see the context of text found in a search. Without a scrolling margin, the cursor is almost invariably positioned at the bottom line of the screen on the item found, and then to see what comes next you have to manually scroll further down. With a scrolling margin, the cursor and found text are repositioned above the bottom of the screen by the margin amount, letting you see the found text and all the text surrounding it. With repeated searches of the same text, this is a huge timesaver.
I think the title is essentially self-explanatory except for a necessary clarification and caveat:
Clarification
I'm not entirely sure if 'narrowing' is the universal term for the feature I'm referring to. What I mean is something like Emacs' 'narrow buffer', ie. the ability to select a region and quickly narrow the editor window to show only that region, and then after some edits to be able to quickly zoom out to see/edit the full file again. It's a feature I like, and find far more useful than code folding.
Caveat
Of course the answer is 'yes -- (X)Emacs' (and possibly vim?). But I'm looking for something other than vim or Emacs; almost certainly a more GUIsh one (think Textmate, TextWrangler etc).
My researches seem to suggest that the straightest answer is just 'no'. I haven't been able to find an editor that runs on OS X that supports narrowing, other than emacs.
I have however figured out a workaround that might be of interest for some scenarios, which is to use Hog Bay Software's QuickCursor in conjunction with one or more editors.
For example, I've tried setting up QuickCursor to fire up TextMate. So now when working in XCode, I can select the text I want to narrow to, hit the global hotkey I have set up, and the selected text pops up in a TextMate window. That can be edited, then a save and dismiss window pops the edited text back in XCode.
This also works if you're just working in TextMate (or, I imagine, one of the other editors that QuickCursor can control); ie. you can select select test in the editor, trigger QuickCursor to open the selected text in a new window, and later pop that text back to the original window.
I'm guessing this is not what you want, but you didn't specifically say so: Aquamacs? It's an emacsen with good integration with OS X (cut, paste, menus, toolbars, etc).
Okay, I'll bite.
I've got really pleasant code/window colors set up in Xcode. Ordinarily, my selection color is very visible.
When I am doing a project search and iterating through the results, however, the results list stays in focus and the found text remains out of focus, using a different background color. This color is extremely hard to detect, especially when the text is embedded in a larger code block and the view is shifting around as it scrolls to the results.
Here's an example:
Left side is in focus (just normal selection), right side is out of focus (during project find)
Often it takes a few seconds to find where the heck the selected text is.
Unless I'm just missing it, Xcode seems to offer no way to change this particular selection color. Interestingly, it also doesn't seem to follow the selection color from the Appearance panel.
Does anyone know a way to change this color or force it to be more visible, short of changing my entire color scheme around?
Use this Xcode plugin:
http://github.com/tjw/XcodeSelectionColorFix
Instructions for using it are here: http://github.com/tjw/XcodeSelectionColorFix/blob/master/README.markdown
You can manually edit the theme file, which might allow a different selection color. If I recall (not on my dev machine), personal themes are in ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/(should be intuitive from here/can't remember)
You can edit them in Property List Editor, if I remember right. The Xcode preferences don't expose all of the options available in the theme file.