How to Get Vim to Use the Background color of your Terminal Emulator instead of the colorscheme

Sunday - June 10, 2018

So, you’d like to get Vim to use the syntax colors from your colorscheme but you would like the background to match the color of your terminal emulator.

Surprisingly, I couldn’t find this info anywhere. But through hacking around with a colorscheme to figure out how it sets background colors, I finally found out how.

To disable your colorscheme’s background, add the following to your Vim config file

highlight Normal ctermbg=none guibg=none
highlight SignColumn ctermbg=none guibg=none
highlight LineNr ctermbg=none guibg=none

GitGutter users WAIT!

If you use GitGutter, you must also add this configuration line:

let g:gitgutter_override_sign_column_highlight = 0

Enjoy!