How to change background color in vim terminal

colorsterminalvim

I am using vim terminal. (:terminal)
(Vim terminal is recently added feature of vim, You could see detail with :help terminal in recently vim. I am not asking about vim on terminal.)

Background color in terminal window become gray like following picture, But I want to change it to white.

How do I do it?

Upside pane is terminal window, Downside one is editor window.

My color settings in vimrc:

background=light
colorscheme default
t_Co=256

Note that I using console vim that installed with homebrew, not gvim

OS: macOS 10.12.6
Vim 8.0

Best Answer

It may be related to your $TERM env var.
See what $TERM is currently set to:
echo $TERM;

I tested this export TERM=xterm-256color on a newer version of macos with vim 8.0. and :terminal is correctly displaying a white background.

Related Solutions

Using colour schemes with vim and putty

By default, PuTTY presents itself as xterm. The terminfo database, used by various programs to determine the terminal capabilities, says xterm supports eight colors only:

$ infocmp -1L xterm | grep max_colors

This means that even if your version of Xterm does support 256-color mode, programs won't know about it.

The easiest fix is to set your $TERM environment variable to xterm-256color.

(In your ~/.profile, you could use:
if [ "$TERM" = xterm ]; then TERM=xterm-256color; fi)
You can tell PuTTY to always identify itself as xterm-256color, via Configuration → Connection → Data → Terminal-type string.

Note: If you use #1 or #2, and you connect to a server which doesn't have the apropriate terminfo entry, all TUI programs will break.
You can also set the 't_Co' option in vim to 256 to override the terminfo value.
```
if &term == "xterm"
    set t_Co=256
endif
```

Or you could edit the terminfo database.

$ infocmp -L -1 xterm | sed -r 's/(max_colors)#[0-9]+/\1#256/' > /tmp/xterm
$ tic /tmp/xterm

The updated entry will be kept in ~/.terminfo.

256 color support for vim background in tmux

From the look of your .bashrc and .profile, the shells inside tmux are overriding the 'default-terminal' setting in your tmux conf. Something like this:

tmux creates new shell with TERM=screen-256color
.bashrc/.profile run, set TERM=xterm-256color
vim runs, tries to use incorrect TERM for tmux

you can check this by running

echo $TERM

in a fresh tmux shell.

Tmux is relatively picky about having a terminal set correctly. If you can, set the term value in gnome-terminal's configuration, not in your .bashrc. Failing that, surround those settings with a check for "screen" or "screen-256color" TERM, and don't reset them in that case.

Tmux REALLY wants the terminal set to screen or screen-256color

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using colour schemes with vim and putty

256 color support for vim background in tmux

Related Question