colorsdebiantmuxvim
I'm currently logged into a server via ssh with ssh -Y and running a tmux session.
If I start vim and run :colorscheme elflord the color scheme is changed. (Although the colors are not exactly what I would expect although they are I think 256 color.
If I create a ~/.vimrc file and put a single line
colorscheme elflord
in it then when I run vim it shows no color (just white text) and I cannot change the color with the :colorscheme command.
It's a bug.
It looks like the "correct" visualisation is the one on the left, where the bold font are not rendered. For what I could understand (here is the reference) the bold attribute was used, originally, to set the highlighted version of the 8 base colours.
Historically, there has been a one-to-one correspondence between the bolded versions of the 8 default ANSI colors and the bright versions of the 8 default colors. Back in the day, when a color program demanded the display of bold text, it was probably just easier for terminal emulators to display a brighter version of whatever color the text was (and expect the user to interpret that as bold) than to display a typeface with a bold weight.
Basically, what is happening here is that, in order to use the full Solarized palette, with the orange, purple and all the levels of grey, the colours are called with the bold attribute, which in turn refers to the alternative 8 colours of the ANSI palette.
Terminal understands this correctly, and shows the orange and the comment grey in normal typesetting, whereas tmux adds an unnecessary bold font to them. In conclusion, the left side is correct whereas the right one is not.
Is there a way to disable the bold rendering of tmux?
I still have to do some research about it, and I will update this answer as soon as I find something.
And here we have the solution! :)
In order to have tmux behave correctly we have to call it telling him that we are in a 256 colours enabled environment.
TERM=xterm-256color /usr/bin/tmux
For convenience we could alias this (i.e. you add alias tmux="<the line above>" to your ~/.bashrc).
Calling tmux as tmux -2, for forcing tmux to run with 256 colours support (instead of redefining the TERM environmental variable) will not allow for correct interpretation of the "bold-alternative" 8 colours (i.e. the brighter variant will also result having a bold typesetting). Therefore, I highly recommend to use the solution here above for having both correct 256 colours interpretation and non-bold "bold-alternative" colours.
You can access environment variables in your vimrc using $NAME. ssh sets the environment variable SSH_CONNECTION within an SSH session to non-empty metadata about the connection. You can combine these two to run configuration code based on whether you're accessing vim over SSH or not:
if $SSH_CONNECTION
colorscheme solarized
endif
The body of the if runs when SSH_CONNECTION is non-empty, so if you put this into your desktop's .vimrc then you'll get the solarized theme over SSH, and whatever you configured earlier the rest of the time.
Best Answer
In recent versions of Vim (starting with Vim 8, I believe), if the user has no personal
~/.vimrcfile, then Vim will execute thedefaults.vimfrom its runtime directory instead, to load sane defaults.The usual recommendation is that when you first create your
~/.vimrcfile, you should include a couple of lines at the top sourcing thedefaults.vimfile, in order to preserve the same settings you were getting from that file (which include enabling filetype detection and syntax highlighting.)See
:help defaults.vim, which will tell you to start a new~/.vimrcfile with the lines:You can then add your
colorscheme elflordconfiguration below these two lines. That should preserve the settings you get by default, but change the colorscheme you use at startup.