Opinions on gVim as opposed to just Vim

Question

I'm finally going to learn Vim, and I will have gVim on my system for a graphical text editor to launch out of pcmanfm. I'm just curious whether any of you feel that there's some advantage to using, or at least learning out of, gVim over Vim.

Answer 1

Dusty wrote:
On topic, by accident; I use vim and gvim pretty much interchangably. tabbing works nicer in gvim. If I'm in a console I type vim cause its shorter (or :edit by mistake often enough that I aliased it to vim). I have my console and my gvim both set to use the zenburn theme, so they look pretty much the same.
gvim looks a bit more modern but on ssh and screen vim is cooler. I'd say use gvim when you can and use vim when its more convenient.
Dusty
I use oceanblack in both but colors are not the same, they are pretty different indeed. I tried zenburn also. In both I type <esc>:color zenburn but only in gvim I have better results.
Maybe I'm missing something. I use Sakura terminal and vim has few colors. Maybe I should use something else for TERM variable....at the moment I have TERM=xterm.
Could you please tell me how did you obtained same colors for vim and gvim?
===EDIT=================================================================================
Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt wrote:
> I have just made a full install of vim 7.0 and gvim using the package
> manager in Debian. My problem is that the syntax highlighting works very
> badly in the terminal version of vim – if it works at all.
> When I try ':colo desert' it changes only the color of the text (but not
> even to the correct colors) and not the background. When I try ':colo
> chela_light' nothing happens at all. Both of these color schemes work
> perfectly in gvim. Any ideas on how to get this working in the terminal?
> Best regards,
> Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt
Are you using default terminal colors (light grey on black) or are you using
some "xterm color scheme" outside of Vim? If you are, Vim is not necessarily
aware of it.
What happens if you log in on a text console (Ctrl-Alt-F2 then repli to the
login prompt with username & password) and start Vim there? Can you set
colorschemes properly?
Use ":view $VIM/vimfiles/colors/chela_light_vim" or ":view
~/.vim/colors/chela_light.vim" (depending on where that color scheme is
located -- it should NOT be under $VIMRUNTIME because it wasn't distributed
with Vim and any upgrade can silently change or remove anything in the
$VIMRUNTIME tree). Does it include "cterm/ctermfg/ctermbg" clauses in its
":hi" statements? If not, it's a GUI-only colorscheme.
Similarly with ":view $VIMRUNTIME/colors/desert".
The settings for console Vim in a color terminal (cterm= ctermbg= ctermfg= )
are not necessarily the same as for gvim (gui= guibg= guifg= ) because a color
terminal typically has 8 background and 16 foreground colors, whereas the GUI
typically has 16,777,216 of each kind.
Best regards,
Tony.
source:http://groups.google.com/group/vim_use/ … 8a58ec9a9e
This explains all. You have to use a colorscheme made for both, gvim and vim.
I tried zellner scheme with white background in sakura virtual terminal and the colors are matching.
If your virtual terminal supports 256 colors you can set in vim: set   t_Co=256 for better results.
Pity that oceanblack scheme is just for gvim.
Well, will just continue using gvim.
Last edited by ArchArael (2008-08-30 11:35:30)