How to make red distinguishable from grey in Terminal profile "Pro" The default for Terminal.app profile Pro is a black background with ANSI colors. Since the background is black the preferred color setting for Vim is background=dark. In this combination red text (emitted from syntax highlighting) is indistinguishable from grey text (at least for me):



"Foo" is red, "bar" is grey. A color picker reveals that red is rendered as R=243, G=222, B=222, so yes it actually is a slight bit more red than grey.

None of the color changing options in Terminal.app preferences allows me to change this to something that makes me recognize it as red. So how can i make red look red?

Edit (Further information from the comments): The issue is reproducible with any Vim (local or ssh remote, from OS X or mac ports) as long as Terminal.app is used for display.
The problem is likely due to your vim settings rather than your terminal settings.

The color you mentioned is pretty close to color 224 (of 256 colors), so you might try looking in your vim colorscheme to see if that color is used in a ctermfg= declaration.

To test and see if I'm right you could try

:syn match Foo /foo/
:hi Foo ctermfg=red


If that turns the word foo red then you know your terminal's red is working properly and it will be an issue with your vim settings.