Vim background color doesn't render properly in GNOME terminal

Question

I'm guessing lots of people get this problem, but I can't seem to find any other threads/questions about it anywhere. I guess it's difficult to capture in keywords.

Basically, Vim doesn't draw the background color when scrolling up in places where there is no text. I've also seen it on my friend's Mac, so it's not peculiar to my setup.

I have a pretty big vimrc, but I get the same problem without a vimrc and setting :colorscheme blue.

I'm using gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). It's a fairly clean install that I set up only a few days ago, so there's not really any funny business going on. I expect this would happen out of the box.

I've not had this problem in other contexts e.g. over SSH with PuTTY or previous versions of Ubuntu which I'm guessing was also gnome-terminal.

What's going on?

Shuddering

I really like that color scheme. Is that available somewhere? (Wish I had an answer for your question -- I have similar issues in iterm2, and ended up just setting my terminal's background color to match the one I set in vim) – Ionian

It's basically :colorscheme blue. Send me an email Mozza314 (at) gmail.com if you'd like the vimrc though. – Shuddering

Related Question : #14690425 tl;dr add set t_ut= to your .vimrc configuration – Freedwoman

The problem is that vim is trying to be efficient at updating the terminal screen. It doesn't redraw any more than it thinks it has to. Spaces remain spaces, so it believes it doesn't need to redraw them. Blank space is treated the same. This could be in an underlying layer, such as curses, which may take it out of vim's control. – Scevor

Answer 1

In Linux I had export TERM=xterm-256color in my .bashrc. That caused Vim to look like this (after setting set t_Co=256):

When I removed that line from my .bashrc and opened a new terminal (exec bash didn't do it). This is what I get (you need to have set t_Co=256):

Hebner

Answer 2

Try running :set t_Co=256 (replacing 256 with the value corresponding to the number of colors your terminal supports). A similar looking (though less conspicuous) problem of mine was caused by using too few of the available terminal colors in Vim. To figure out how many colors your terminal supports, see this.

Ruyter

I don't use ubuntu much anymore but I have a similar problem on my mac and it doesn't work for it. I'll be sure to try it next time I'm in vim on ubuntu though :/. – Shuddering

Answer 3

I had to do two things:

• Remove set t_Co=256 in my .vimrc. (The terminal showed 256 colors anyway)

• The color blocks still appeared when scrolling though, so I had to do the change detailed here: https://superuser.com/questions/457911/in-vim-background-color-changes-on-scrolling

Farnese