Syntax highlighting through an ssh connection

[Kaleb23]

My apologies for asking for help on something which may have already
been answered.

I'm on a mac ssh'd into a Centos box. On my local system vi will show
syntax highlighting but when I shell in it does not. I've tried to
find an answer to this for quite a long time now. "Syntax on" does
not work. I've copied the sample vimrc that came with the
installation which is version 7.0.237 and that did not work either. I
would not call myself a vi newbie but I can't figure this out. If I'm
forced to look at badly formatted code the least they can do is let me
see it in technicolor.

[Kyle Lippincott]

This typically indicates that TERM is not set properly.  I assume you use Terminal.app, bash, and the default 10.5 or 10.6 ssh.  This should automatically get you a 16-color terminal.  In vim on the Centos box, what do you get when you run: ":set t_Co?"  What about ":set term?"  Try setting t_Co to be 8 (it will use bold to simulate 16, which you can configure in Terminal.app's settings): ":set t_Co=8".  

Ensure of course that you have a color scheme and syntax file set: ":set ft?" to determine if the filetype was identified correctly, and ":color koehler" should work on a low-color terminal.

If you were to use iTerm2 you would be able to have 256 colors, but that probably involves a bit more setup than the simple case listed above.

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[John Vonachen]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Kyle Lippincott <spec...@pewpew.net> wrote:

This typically indicates that TERM is not set properly.  I assume you use Terminal.app, bash, and the default 10.5 or 10.6 ssh.  This should automatically get you a 16-color terminal.  In vim on the Centos box, what do you get when you run: ":set t_Co?"  What about ":set term?"  Try setting t_Co to be 8 (it will use bold to simulate 16, which you can configure in Terminal.app's settings): ":set t_Co=8".  

Ensure of course that you have a color scheme and syntax file set: ":set ft?" to determine if the filetype was identified correctly, and ":color koehler" should work on a low-color terminal.

If you were to use iTerm2 you would be able to have 256 colors, but that probably involves a bit more setup than the simple case listed above.

I typed vim instead of vi.  That was it.  We aparently have more than one version of vi and one worked and the other did not.  Thanks for your efforts.   BTW - I downloaded iterm2 and tried it out and I think I like the normal Terminal better.

[Kyle Lippincott]

Honestly, I like Apple's Terminal.app better as well, but if I'm doing a lot of work in vim from the mac (normally I'm on a linux box), I like to have my color scheme (requires 256 color support) and mouse support.  If Apple would just add those to Terminal.app, I don't think I'd ever use iTerm :)

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[Carl Jacobsen]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010, John Vonachen wrote:

> I typed vim instead of vi. That was it. We aparently have more than one
> version of vi and one worked and the other did not.

Indeed, on our Linux systems (RHEL), "vi" gets /bin/vi, which is vim
compiled with "tiny" features (and thus doesn't have syntax highlighting),
while "vim" gets /usr/bin/vim, which is compiled with "huge" features and
the Perl & Python interpreters. I suspect other Linux flavors do similar.

Cheers,
Carl