Mac OS X vim colors mangled

macos terminal vim color-scheme
iljkj picture iljkj · Sep 4, 2010 · Viewed 22.1k times · Source

Here's my setup

  • Mac OS X 10.6
  • VIM (default version that comes with OSX 10.6)
  • rails.vim (installed in .vim/autoload)
  • ir_black.vim (installed in .vim/colors)
  • i have "colorscheme ir_black" and "syn on" in ~/.vimrc

Now when I go into terminal and edit a ruby file with vim my colors are messed up. There are only a few colors showing up and some text is even blinking. I'm wondering if there's a conflict between rails.vim syntax highlighting and the ir_black color scheme? Can anyone help me fix this? I would like to use the ir_black color scheme.

Answer

rossipedia picture rossipedia · Sep 4, 2010

The Mac OSX Terminal.app in Snow Leopard does not support 256 colors, which is required for the ir_black theme (this is the theme I use).

Download and try something like iTerm.app (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/), and you shouldn't have a problem with colors.

Or you could use MacVim (http://code.google.com/p/macvim/)

Edit: As of OSX 10.7 Lion, the built in Terminal.app now supports 256 colors. See the comment below by Chris Page for how to achieve this.

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