Anytime I switch to a colorscheme the background turns this ugly gray that gives everything a washed out look. Any ideas?
I've tried the following two things but no luck:
make sure terminal color is set to xterm-256 color
:set background=dark
My Iterm2 color preset is dark background
That looks like Dracula in the screenshot. Is it only happening then, or with other colorschemes as well? What is the background color of your terminal emulator ?
Another possibly important clue: I found a schema where this is not taking effect. ` Plug 'agude/vim-eldar'` Specifically looked for a high contrast theme to test this.
before: :verbose hi Normal Normal xxx guifg=White guibg=Black Last set from ~/.local/share/nvim/plugged/vim-eldar/colors/eldar.vim
after :verbose hi Normal Normal xxx ctermfg=255 ctermbg=236 guifg=#F8F8F2 guibg=#282A36 Last set from ~/.local/share/nvim/plugged/vim/colors/Dracula.vim
I'm not sure what the cause is, just trying to narrow down the symptoms. Again, have you been through your vimrc (or verified that this doesn't happen without your vimrc?) Does this happen when you use colorschemes shipped with vim (e.g. elflord, &c.) ?
Er, no. Not really. Can you try vim -u NONE -N, then enable filetypes and syntax, pick a colorscheme, and edit that file? If that causes no problems, it's your vimrc. I'll repost the link for debugging here
Wait! I think part of the problem is the background highlighting. elflord doesn't set the ctermbg attribute, so it doesn't change the background inside vim (using your term's bg). This means somewhere in your vimrc the background highlighting on Normal is probably affecting things
btw you might wan't to consider wrapping the autocmds in an autogroup
Ok so I am one of the maintainers on Dracula which is why this piqued my interest. Have you read through the dracula help file and tried any of the options provided in there?
I've been doing let g:airline_theme='dracula' separately as well (that controls only airline). I don't have a problem with my vimrc, in which I have the same line
No problem; gotta start somewhere ! Glad to see you're trying it out. Ok, so are you still having problems with the Dracula colorscheme? Is it happening for any other colorscheme?
Yes I am - it appeared to go away in Elflord - then I switched back to Dracula and it came back, then I took away those au commands and the problem has persisted in Dracula, and trying out the let g: configs and nothing has work yet
but interestingly enough, switching to something like molokai used to give me similar distortions but now it looks kind of right when I switched just now to molokai
this is madness, okay so. I switched over to a different tmux window that had an active nvim project on it and it had the old color scheme since when I booted vim it was set to that at the time. so all I did was source my vimrc and now I have molokai WITH the grey hazy background
I think I've got (part of) it. You need to move the line let g:dracular_coloterm = 1 to above the colorscheme dracula line. If the problem persists in dracula, change the 1 to a 0.
Re: molokai, it might be better to restart vim and see if it's still happening. Re-sourcing a vimrc on top of a running session can introduce complexities with the interactions of colorschemes.
That is, the line let g:dracula_colorterm = 0 tells Dracula not to include background fill colors (some grey color that is a 256-color approximation of the real color)
Well, no, not necessarily. In dracula's case, dracula was setting the background color to a specific color (which happen's to be an ugly grey on 256-color terminals). We then disable the bg highlighting with a special variable, so you now just see your terminal background.
In molokai's case, well, idk. I can't see the screenshots on their readme
but they say they have a dark grey background by default
Just saw this >Only the dark gray background style is supported on terminal vim at this time. Not sure if still true
Colorschemes either (a) set the bg color, or (b) don't. If they don't, you see your terms bg. However, as with anything, you can adjust it rather easily from your vimrc (something like au ColorScheme molokai highlight Normal ctermbg=...)
No problem. also, as I hinted at above, that bg is normally set by using the ctermbg and guibg attributes of the Normal highlighting group. However, at that point you're betting off consulting vim's extensive help manual; it's easy to get lost in all the guides and vimrc's online before having gotten through some of the basics.
Let me know how you fare on molokai. I'll turn some of this discussion into an answer eventually
Ok so :help :highlight led to me to highlight-args which says...
`ctermfg={color-nr} *highlight-ctermfg* *E421* ctermbg={color-nr} *highlight-ctermbg* The {color-nr} argument is a color number. Its range is zero to (not including) the number given by the termcap entry "Co". The actual color with this number depends on the type of terminal and its settings. Sometimes the color also depends on the settings of "cterm". For example, on some systems "cterm=bold ctermfg=3" gives another color, on others you just get color 3. `
seems like part of the issue might be lack of an alpha value in 8 bit colors? like I'm having trouble how anything background could look good just mentally seeing all the flat grey options
having trouble conceiving of how any background could look good*
Where do you see flat grey? The table at the bottom has a lot of color. Plus, you might be overthinking it. What if you just do None to turn it off and see how it looks?
Discussion between David Ben Knoble a…
Discussion between David Ben Knoble a…