With your TERM set to anything close to accurate, you can then leverage all 256 colors in other applications without manually tweaking the settings for every application. With your auto-login username specified, and public key authorization (which you should be using) and a key agent running (PuTTY's Pageant does this) you can select a host and log in without being prompted for username or password. This is the same preferences page where you specify your auto-login username, so you should be visiting this page anyway. In PuTTY this is changed in the Configuration in the Connection -> Data section. PuTTY doesn't support Techtronix mode and so is not fully xterm compatible.)

It is relatively easy to change the TERM setting PuTTY uses to set it to send it as 'xterm-256color' (or install the full set of terminfo files and set it to the proper setting of 'putty-256color'. Allow terminal to specify ANSI colours Allow terminal to specify xterm 256-colour mode Bolded text is a different colour With the settings below, using :runtime syntax/colortest.vim shows all 23 colors as distinctly unique. After inserting the following lines in my vimrc, I was able to use all the color schemes defined by Vim. I tried many different things with no decent result until I found the following code in Vim's help. I am using PuTTY in Windows to access a Unix box, and the Terminal-type string in PuTTY is set to xterm. Tip 1576 Printable Monobook Previous Next

Vim set color scheme vimrc