Configuring solarized colorscheme in gnome terminal, tmux and vim

Question

I'm struggling to make the Solarized colorscheme correctly working on an Ubuntu 13.10 machine inside Vim inside tmux inside the gnome-terminal.

I've started configuring gnome-terminal using the script on this repository and it displays the colors correctly. The same goes if I run Vim (with the official Solarized colorscheme) inside the terminal, without tmux.

Then I tried to configure tmux using this. It happens that when I run Vim the syntax highlight for php or javascript code is wrong or, at least, different from the one I see running Vim without tmux. I've tried also running tmux as tmux -2. The colors are different, but still the syntax highlight is not correct.

Answer 1

I tested it out and got it working in the following way:

1. Install gnome solarized colorscheme. You can get it from https://github.com/aruhier/gnome-terminal-colors-solarized.

2. Install solarized colorscheme for vim. You can get it from https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized. In .vimrc you should add following settings:

   set t_Co=256
   set background=dark
   colorscheme solarized
   

3. Set correct TERM variable by adding following line to your .bashrc/.zshrc

   export TERM=screen-256color-bce
   

4. Run gnome-terminal, tmux, vim and profit.

Answer 2

These days GNOME Terminal comes with Solarized colours built in. To use it, you need to change two settings in the profile that you're using. The obvious one is the text and background colour. You also need to set the palette to Solarized, though. You can find this setting below the one for the text and background colour. At this point, setting t_Co or g:solarized_termcolors in Vim shouldn't be necessary.

The palette is the part that I missed at first, which caused me to puzzle why the text in Vim and other applications was bright blue.