Setting the Vim background colors

As vim's own help on set background says, "Setting this option does not change the background color, it tells Vim what the background color looks like. For changing the background color, see |:hi-normal|."

For example

:highlight Normal ctermfg=grey ctermbg=darkblue

will write in white on blue on your color terminal.

In a terminal emulator like konsole or gnome-terminal, you should to set a 256 color setting for vim.

:set  t_Co=256

After that you can to change your background.

Using set bg=dark with a white background can produce nearly unreadable text in some syntax highlighting schemes. Instead, you can change the overall colorscheme to something that looks good in your terminal. The colorscheme file should set the background attribute for you appropriately. Also, for more information see:

:h color

Try adding

set background=dark

to your .gvimrc too. This work well for me.