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Coloring bug with Vim's ctermbg; workaround with VimLeave?

I recently discovered Vim colorschemes, and in the process have discovered a rather curious bug: when I run hi Normal ctermbg in Vim, the color change carries over to the shell that I'm running Vim in, like so:

vim-ctermbg-bug

I'm using PuTTYtray (but also see the behavior in PuTTY) with 256 colors enabled , bolded text indicated by font changes, and $TERM set to "putty-256color"; my .vimrc is as follows:

set t_Co=256
colors zenburn

and zenburn.vim can be found here. I've isolated the problem specifically to specifically line 298, where it first configures ctermbg for Normal highlighting.

(As an aside: it seems that when using PuTTY tray with specific color settings, in Normal highlighting, ctermbg has to be first set simultaneously with guifg or guibg, e.g. hi Normal guifg=#dcdccc ctermbg=237, and only after that will hi Normal ctermbg=some_val work.)

Does anyone happen to have any idea why this is happening?

I've also tried to do a workaround by running hi Normal ctermbg=None on VimLeave (although I recognize that this is problematic if I run multiple Vim instances, so if anyone can suggest an alternative that would also be welcome), but with no success. Adding the following to my .vimrc does not work:

function! RESET_ctermbg()
    "reset $ctermbg to None"
    exec "hi Normal ctermbg=None"
endfunction
au VimLeave * call RESET_ctermbg()
Solution

  • I've fixed the problem by changing $TERM to xterm-256color; my best bet is that putty-256color is not well-supported enough as a shell to handle behavior like the vim colorscheme I was doing, so I don't even need to try to make the workaround work anymore.