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set vim colors in iterm2

I have been using Vim almost exclusively for 3 years now. It has become my text editing workhorse for both code and also prose. Vim has become a joy to use and to continue configuring and tweaking. Many more paragraphs could be spent explaining the greatness of Vim to you, but I will refrain. Today we’re talking about colors in Vim.

I just recently switched to iTerm 2 from using OS X’s default Terminal.app. Terminal.app met my needs for the most part except its inability to handle a long command that spilled into the next line. I started using Terminal.app back in 2008, and this bug is still occurring. I decided to check out iTerm 2 after my buddy Og (@ogmaciel) suggested it because, “it’s awesome, dude!”

I’m happy with iTerm 2 so far, but it took me a few to figure out the color situation. I like a dark background with light text in my terminal, but I prefer Vim’s light-background color palette to its dark-background colors. This was never an issue in Terminal.app, but it seems that iTerm 2 is setting some value that Vim interprets causing it to default to background=dark. After poking around Vim’s help docs and experimenting with ordering I came upon the magic incantation providing my desired results:

set nocompatible
" snip
colorscheme default
set t_Co=256
set background=light
" snip

I haven’t messed with it a whole lot, but my guess is these settings would go best near the top of your ~/.vimrc before you load any plugins or start changing other colors. For more info on these settings, please see Vim’s help system with :help nocompatible, :help colorscheme, :help t_Co, and :help 'background', respectively.

Now I have iTerm 2 set up just the way I like it, with Vim colors the way I like them. All quiet on the terminal front. Happy Vimming!