At my job, I ssh into a development server everyday. I usually use exceed XStart to ssh in, but I downloaded PuTTY to see if I could do anything that I couldn't do with XStart.
I spend almost the entire day looking at the regular white background/black text terminal. The TERM variable in the server is set to vt100, and as far as I know, it's an eight-color display.
I was wondering if there was a way to have PuTTY emulate a 256 color terminal. I would really like some syntax highlighting in Vim, and the built-in ones are just awful. I've tried vim -T xterm-256color, and that only seems to let me use the default color schemes.
I also tried setting t_Co=256, but that doesn't work either.
If it helps, the dev server is a Red Hat 6 box.
Best Answer
1. Configure Putty
In Settings > Windows > Colours there is a check box for "Allow terminal to use xterm 256-colour mode".
2. Let the app know
You'll probably have to change Settings -> Connection > Data > Terminal-type string to:
xterm-256colorif your server has a terminfo entry for
putty-256color, typically in/usr/share/terminfo/p/putty-256color, you can set Putty's Terminal-Type toputty-256colorinstead.The main thing here is to make the server use an available Terminfo entry that most closely matches the way Putty is configured.
See also http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/terminfo.html