Cannot set the color scheme in VIM

Question

I am trying to set the color scheme Wombat in VIM. I followed the instructions as:

1. Downloaded the wombat.vim file to the location ~/.vim/colors/ directory
2. Opened the VIM editor and set the color scheme by :colorscheme wombat

However, the editor remains unchanged after running the command. Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Try set t_Co=256 in your .vimrc. This could be a problem with your terminal not supporting 256 colors.

Answer 2

Try some radically different colorscheme first, like murphy, then switch back to wombat. If nothing changes, then vim probably can't read your wombat.vim, check permissions on the file and on the colors dir to be sure.

Otherwise if you're seeing colors, but missing gray background, it most likely means that your terminal does not support 256 colors as @maverik mentioned. Try setting you terminal emulation to xterm-256color (if your OS supports it) and try again.