I have decided to clean up my vim colorschemes. I have been using ir_black for sometime but it does not look the same as others who use it. I think I was forcing it into 256 or 16 color mode.

Some vim command line on some terminals looked awful and I had to switch to another colorscheme just so I could see the text.

I have decided to pick an 8,16,256 and full color scheme and load them automatically, rather than trying to find a colorscheme which degraded gracefully, they just never seemed to do it that well.

From sanctum.geek.nz I discovered the tput colors command. Vims &t_Co will reflect this value. But it only reflects the calling terminals capabilities, so calling gvim or mvim from an 8 bit color terminal your &t_Co will still be 8.

After some trouble getting the 8 colour scheme to work posted a question on superuser.

The main solution seems to be to append your TERM envar with -256color to force 256 Colour detection. I was originally hesitant to blindly apply 256 color to any system I may be working on, but I think it would be rare to come across a terminal that does not support 256 colors these days. This would also have to be a system/network where I have already set-up my dotfiles.

Adding -256color to term makes tput return 256 and makes vim t_Co 256 as well. For csh:

setenv TERM $TERM-256color

For a bit more protection you should stop multiple -256colors being appended i.e. stop xterm-256color-256color if called from bash with 256color extension already applied.

if ($TERM =~ *256color*) then
  #Already 256color
else
  setenv TERM $TERM-256color
endif

For Bash:

if [[ "$TERM" != *256color* ]]
then
  export TERM=$TERM-256color
fi

Using a python script you can display color charts in the terminal. It should be clear if 256 colors is not working, you would only see 16 colour blocks.

colour block

After all of this instead of getting my vim colour schemes to degrade gracefully I force everything into 256 colours mode. Which I think is actually ok and I get to use better colour schemes all/more of the time.