Colorscheme is not changing anything in vim

Question

I'm typing :colorscheme desert or :colorscheme default or any other type of colorscheme in my vim, and I'm just getting the same one colorered text for my code with a black background. I would like the text in my files to have multiple colors to distinguish things but don't know how to do this

Answer 1

Perhaps you could provide your .vimrc and :version.

You may be missing any of these:

• syntax on
• set t_Co=256
• filetype plugin indent on

Answer 2

You can check how the colorscheme is rendered via :hi. If all you see is black and white, Vim probably does not recognize your (color) terminal, and :set t_Co? will output 2 [colors]. Check your $TERM setting then.