Vim, tmux, iTerm broken colors

I do most of my work in Vim (or Neovim) in tmux inside of iTerm on my Mac.

I found my color schemes were being properly applied in Neovim but not in Vim (version 8).

Adding the following values to my .vimrc corrected the problem for me.

let &t_8f = "\<Esc>[38;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"
let &t_8b = "\<Esc>[48;2;%lu;%lu;%lum"

Related Resources

• https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/993#issuecomment-255651605
• https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/10985/vim-under-tmux-looses-color-scheme-in-iterm2

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.