Using colour schemes with vim and putty

centoscolorsputtyvim

I am trying to use the desert color scheme with VIM 7.0 on CentOS 5.6 x64 located here:

http://hans.fugal.net/vim/colors/desert.vim

I've downloaded the file and saved it in my ~/.vim/colors directory. I then tell VIM to use the colour scheme by issuing:

:colors desert

It's supposed to look like this:

enter image description here

However I get this:

enter image description here

I'm logging onto this server just as a regular user (not root or sudo) using PuTTY 0.60 and have set the following options under Window -> Colours:

Allow terminal to specify ANSI colours - checked
Allow terminal to use 256-colour mode - checked
Bolded test is a different colour - checked
Attempt to use logical palettes - unchecked
Use system colours - unchecked

If I sudo or logon as root and try the same I don't get any colours at all other than white text on a black background.

Are these schemes mostly aimed at gVIM and is PuTTY just not able to display these colours?

I've google'd around a bit and bumped into articles such as this one but they don't appear to work.

Best Answer

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.

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