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Status bar color in Vim terminal mode

If you’re using a custom color scheme (why wouldn’t you?) in conjunction with a terminal mode in Vim (again, why wouldn’t you?), you may have noticed that the terminal status bar has no respect for your color scheme.

Run :term, and you’ll be greeted to the default status bar:

Since terminal mode is still in beta in Vim 8.1, we have to manually set the highlighting groups. It’ll require a bit of digging.

Navigate to the directory containing your current color scheme. Depending on the plugin manager, the color schemes are located in different places. On Linux, default color schemes often live in /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors. In this example, I’m using PaperColor scheme, and I have it installed using vim-plug in ~/.vim/plugged/papercolor-theme, and colors/PaperColor.vim is the file we’re looking for.

Search for StatusLine and StatusLineNC (tip: you can do a whole word search in Vim by running /\<StatusLine\>), and note the values used (you might have to jump through a few variables if the color scheme author decided to be fancy). You’re interested in ctermbg, ctermfg, guibg, and guifg.

You might find something like this:

hi StatusLine ctermbg=24 ctermfg=254 guibg=#004f87 guifg=#e4e4e4
hi StatusLineNC ctermbg=252 ctermfg=238 guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#444444

Copy those lines to your ~/.vimrc. Change StatusLine to StatusLineTerm, and change StatusLineNC to StatusLineTermNC:

" Manually set the status line color.
hi StatusLineTerm ctermbg=24 ctermfg=254 guibg=#004f87 guifg=#e4e4e4
hi StatusLineTermNC ctermbg=252 ctermfg=238 guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#444444

Reload ~/.vimrc (:w | so %), and the terminal mode status line should have the same colors as your color scheme:

Above, hi is a shorthand for highlight, which is used to define highlight group colors. StatusLineTerm and StatusLineTermNC define the highlight groups for terminal mode status line (in active and inactive windows respectively). Options ctermbg and guibg define the background color, and ctermfg and guifg are responsible for the foreground (text) color.

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