Setting the Vim background colors

linux background vim vi

315,659

Solution 1

As vim's own help on set background says, "Setting this option does not change the background color, it tells Vim what the background color looks like. For changing the background color, see |:hi-normal|."

For example

:highlight Normal ctermfg=grey ctermbg=darkblue

will write in white on blue on your color terminal.

Solution 2

In a terminal emulator like konsole or gnome-terminal, you should to set a 256 color setting for vim.

:set  t_Co=256

After that you can to change your background.

Solution 3

Try adding

set background=dark

to your .gvimrc too. This work well for me.

Solution 4

Using set bg=dark with a white background can produce nearly unreadable text in some syntax highlighting schemes. Instead, you can change the overall colorscheme to something that looks good in your terminal. The colorscheme file should set the background attribute for you appropriately. Also, for more information see:

:h color

Solution 5

supplement of windows

gvim version: 8.2

location of .gvimrc: %userprofile%/.gvimrc

" .gvimrc
colorscheme darkblue

Which color is allows me to choose?

Find your install directory and go to the directory of colors. in my case is: %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Vim\vim82\colors

blue.vim
darkblue.vim
slate.vim
...
README.txt

View more solutions

315,659

Author by

Maksim Vi.

Software developer in an online social entertainment company

Updated on July 08, 2022

Comments

Maksim Vi. almost 2 years
When I try to change the background colors in .vimrc or directly in Vim using the command:
```
set background=dark
```
... it doesn't affect my background at all. Neither does the light option. However, it looks okay when I run gvim.

Is there a way to change the background in Vim without changing my Konsole settings?

EDIT Okay, there is a difference between guifg/guibg and ctermfg/ctermbg. While the GUI accepts lots of different color combinations, cterm allows only few standard ones.
Maksim Vi. almost 15 years

Thanks, it works. I tried that option before, but it seems that not all colors work, for instance brown and yellow options don't affect my default console background at all.
rampion almost 15 years

that may be b/c of what kind of terminal vim thinks you have.
Maksim Vi. almost 15 years

that actually why I posted my question here. Even dark colorschemes didn't affect my default background color.
Alex Martelli almost 15 years

Yep, setting up your terminal description properly to make vim happy can be a hassle (I remember epic past battles with early Linux, BSD and other Unix flavors -- nowadays with Mac and Ubuntu it just seems to work, more or less, even across ssh among them, and I don't have to do much vi-editing elsewhere these days).
Marin about 11 years

How can I add this to my vimrc?
Matthew about 11 years

Also see :help hl-NonText for the background colour after the last line of the file.
Matthew about 11 years

@Marin: put exactly the line from the example into your vimrc :highlight Normal ctermfg=grey ctermbg=darkblue. Sub in whatever colours you want.
Bart Louwers about 8 years

You probably want to set that in your Terminal instead: export TERM='xterm-256color'.
Julio Marins almost 8 years

LPT: don't try to execute .vimrc as a shell command just put the line there and be happy
JonnyRaa about 5 years

you can omit the ctermfg=blah if you just want to change the background colour
Leo about 3 years

Putting this in .vimrc does not work for me.