Solarized color definitions in vimrc file

colorsvimvimrc

The solarized theme defines some base colors and assigns those to variables, as seen here.

I would like to know how I can use these color definitions in my .vimrc file.
Currently, I use pathogen to load solarized and it is loaded with a simple syntax enabled and colorscheme solarized, but when I want to reference e.g. s:base00 in my .vimrc file, I get an error:

E421: Color name or number not recognized: ctermfg=s:base00

Best Answer

There are two problems:

The :highlight command does not evaluate ctermfg values as expressions. It accepts only a literal color number, or a color name (see :help cterm-colors). You get E421 because s:base00 is not a number, nor a valid color name.

You could use execute 'highlight GroupName ctermfg=' . s:base00 to build an command string and execute it (this is basically what colors/solarized.vim does); however there is an additional problem.
Variables that start with s: are script-local variables (see :help s:var), so they are not accessible in your .vimrc (or anywhere except the script in which they are defined: colors/solarized.vim).

The defining script “exports” the color values as a part of the highlight groups that it defines, but does not seem to export the individual cterm/gui values it uses for each Solarized color. If you want to create your own highlight group that uses these values, then you will probably have to edit it into your copy of colors/solarized.vim (though you may want to use s:fg_base00/s:bg_base00 instead of s:base00 since the former cover guifg vs. ctermfg so that your group would automatically work on both GUIs and terminals).

Related Solutions

Temporary .vimrc

Suppose you have this other set of settings in /tmp/myvimrc. If my reading of man vim is correct you can start vim with this set of settings using the following:

$ vim -u /tmp/myvimrc

Thus, to make this an option for the rest of the session, I would create a function that sets this as an alias for vim. Thus, in bash I would put something like this in my .bashrc file:

function vimswitch {
    alias vim='vim -u /tmp/myvimrc'
}

Then, when I wanted my new vim settings, I would just run:

$ vimswitch

Note that I wouldn't store myvimrc in /tmp since this could easily be cleared out upon reboot. If you are using a shell other than bash this should still be possible, but the syntax could differ slightly.

Terminal color theory

The indexed color palette has the actual rendering open to interpretation - on actual hardware, there were different standards (especially brown vs. dark yellow, brown is more useful and nicer to look at).

Just check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

On terminal emulators, it depends on the configuration. Most emulators have a mode defined (echo $TERM), singifying which old-school hardware it is emulating. The color is the least of the changes - other control codes (invisible character strings that control the cursor position, bold/invert video, blinking and whatever) can have different codes too. That's the garbage you sometimes get, when you press cursors when the terminal type is incorrectly set (over ssh, for instance). Some more sophisticated emulators actually don't care about the ancient color standards and let you define your own colors (Konsole - which Yakuake uses - has color profiles). Modern terminal emulators actually support more colors than that (256), but of course, the application running in the terminal has to recognize this capability (through termcap or something, or by reading $TERM variable), and output the correct character combinations to use them.

What you actually want to read is this, there is even a color table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Temporary .vimrc

Terminal color theory

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