Configuring solarized colorscheme in gnome terminal, tmux and vim

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.


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/sigurdga/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.