256 colors in vim and How to install new color scheme [closed]

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I'm under Ubuntu 64 bit 13.04, I'm starting with vim and I don't understand an error that I'm getting

Error detected while processing distinguished.vim: line 16: The distinguished color scheme requires gvim or a 256-color terminal Press ENTER or type command to continue

As you can guess I'm trying to use a new colorscheme that I downloaded from here , I saved it under ~/.vim/colors/ and It's my understanding that this .vimrc is fine for what I'm trying to do:

colorscheme distinguished

Obiviously I have more than 256 colors available on my system and I have millions of colors for my display, so what it's this about and how I can make a correct use of this colorscheme ?

Answer 1

You need a terminal application that supports 256 colors, and a TERM environment variable that also points to a 256-color terminfo. The number of colors available to your terminal has nothing to do with the rest of your setup :)

Try in your console:

export TERM=xterm-256color
vim

It might not work with your terminal program, but for recent versions of xterm, it does.

Terminals vary a lot in their capabilities; some terminals are very dumb (think of a keyboard with a line printer); some are very narrow, some are paginated, some support underlining, some have colours, some have unusual keyboard mappings, and so on. To support all of these, there needs to be a database of capabilities for each terminal, so that applications know what they can and cannot do; that's the point of terminfo and of TERM. By declaring TERM=xterm-256color you're indicating to applications that your terminal supports the xterm capabilities including 256 colors. You can have a look in your /usr/share/terminfo/ directory to see the incredible number of terminals that are supported by your box, and man terminfo will show you the sheer number of configurable options for terminals.

Answer 2

Did you put distinguished.vim under ~/.vim/colors?

If you put the directory vim-distinguished there, it would not work.

Also I think you need to have the following line in .vimrc

syntax on