Sometimes you'll find that the color schemes you're trying out don't look as nice or don't display as many colors as you see in screenshots online.

This is most likely due to the fact that your Terminal emulator mistakenly tells Vim that it only supports 8 colors, and not the 256 most likely available in modern Terminal emulators. For that, you'll have to properly set the $TERM environment variable.

It's most common when using tmux and GMU Screen, as they might wrongly report the number of colors available.

To view the current content of the $TERM environment variable, run the following in your shell:

$ echo $TERM

If you're using tmux, add the following to your .tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "xterm-256color"

If you're a GNU Screen user, add the following to your .screenrc:

term "xterm-256color"

If the preceding didn't apply to you, add the following to your .bashrc:

TERM=xterm-256color

However, overriding $TERM in your .bashrc is rarely a good idea, and you may want to do some deeper research into what sets your $TERM environment variable to the wrong format.