PaperClip + ag + fzf = poor colors

[rr-]

I'm using:

• NVIM v0.1.5-370-g02e6914
• rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.22 - released: 2015-10-11 (the version with 24 bit patch)
• ag 0.32.0
• fzf 0.12.2

After issuing :Ag command, the results look less than satisfactory:

Specifically, the green and the yellow look too bright.

From what I've observed, all of the popular themes (solarized, gotham, zenburn) do not seem to target these specific colours. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they're a part of Neovim's new :terminal capabilities. I'm not sure if these colors can be changed yet, but if not, IMHO it's worth some attention and can be brought up to the Neovim folks?

[pickfire]

@rr- If I recall correctly, papercolor theme doesn't have support for Ag and FZF. I am using neovim too but I haven't found these problem. Although the theme for neovim and vim is a bit different (neovim is slightly brighter).

[NLKNguyen]

I'll need sometime to setup the environment to reproduce the issue before I can inspect. I'll let you know when I do that. In the mean time @rr- , can you please try to alternate the color palette of your terminal to see whether those bright colors are from the terminal or Vim?

[rr-]

These don't come from the terminal. After setting every color in .XResources to #000000, running xrdb and restarting URxvt, the results inside Neovim are still rendered in bright green and yellow (whereas PS1 etc. is black like you'd expect).

[NLKNguyen]

I can't get FZF to work on Windows yet. It's ruby gem problem (again haizzz). I'll try again on Ubuntu.

[vbauerster]

@rr do you use fzf.vim plugin? If so try following:

" Customize fzf colors to match your color scheme
let g:fzf_colors =
\ { 'fg':      ['fg', 'Normal'],
  \ 'bg':      ['bg', 'Normal'],
  \ 'hl':      ['fg', 'Comment'],
  \ 'fg+':     ['fg', 'CursorLine', 'CursorColumn', 'Normal'],
  \ 'bg+':     ['bg', 'CursorLine', 'CursorColumn'],
  \ 'hl+':     ['fg', 'Statement'],
  \ 'info':    ['fg', 'PreProc'],
  \ 'border':  ['fg', 'Ignore'],
  \ 'prompt':  ['fg', 'Conditional'],
  \ 'pointer': ['fg', 'Exception'],
  \ 'marker':  ['fg', 'Keyword'],
  \ 'spinner': ['fg', 'Label'],
  \ 'header':  ['fg', 'Comment'] }

[LunarWatcher]

I'm 99% sure this isn't an FZF problem, but rather an issue with the Papercolor bright theme and the Windows terminal system in general.

The problem is reproducible with both set shell=cmd and set shell=powershell, as well as the Linux system bash, likely because they all run on the same color system.

The main issue here is that both Powershell and cmd, of of the box, run dark color schemes. I'm also pretty sure it lets you change colors by "name" and not type. I'm honestly not sure how to describe that properly - I'll get back to that.

Powershell adds some highlighting by default, so I'll be using it to demonstrate the issue quickly.

With the bright theme:

I typed some keyword - the some is highlighted with yellow and disappears.

With the dark variant:

It's readable.

However, if you take a look at the full Powershell terminal:

There's one thing that pops out:

Regardless of the colorscheme, the colors are always the same.

Let's take this one step further with FZF.

First, with no config:

Again, notice the yellow.

Again with dark:

With the FZF config, the colors change slightly, but they yellow remains:

And dark:

The yellow is still there, but the color of the numbers, as well as search results on other lines, changed. Possibly the current directory as well, but I can't tell if they're that different.

Here's a side by side comparison of :FZF with dark and bright:

I had to use cmd as the terminal for FZF to work though - I'm not sure if that makes any difference. At least I couldn't get any differences yesterday.

I played around for a while trying to find a variant that doesn't provide yellow, but I seem to end up with red for search results, light blue for search results on the current line, and yellow for text on the current line. I managed to get blue for text on the current line, and green on one go, but I can't get any of the other colors to work. I managed to get pink, but it wasn't on the one that was supposed to be pink according to the colorscheme.

As I mentioned earlier, both Powershell and CMD have config for colors in their settings:

These define a bunch of colors, but I'm not sure how modifying them changes anything. I couldn't figure it out, but I don't do much work with Powershell or CMD beyond FZF/Vim.

I'm not sure where the "blame" lies, and being somewhat new to Vim, I'm not entirely sure how much control PaperColor has over the Windows terminal colors, but there's at least a color mapping issue somewhere. The FZF config does have some impact, but it doesn't map the colors properly.

If relevant:

gVim 8.1 PaperColor from rev 129608399ad3cc49dde798741a64c14131dfc908 Windows 10, 1809