Airline theme breaks with transparent vim windows.

[ry-dgel]

I'm using Urxvt with real transparency and Compton as a compositor. In order to get a transparent background with nvim I set, :hi Normal ctermbg=none in init.vim.

This causes a bunch of red to take over in vim-airline, as it gets the colors from the theme after the previous change is made. Without changing my init.vim, if I create a new window and then pass the previous statement as a command, everything works fine, as vim-airline has already read the right colors.

Before.

After. (Statement in config.)

How it should look. (Statement passed as command in existing window.)

[ry-dgel]

I found a work around for now, by changing the background using a vim autocmd, the change only takes effect after everything loads.

autocmd VimEnter * hi Normal ctermbg=none

Does this perfectly.

[alpertuna]

@ry-dgel I experienced similar problem and your solution works well, thanks 🎉

[3ximus]

I was having this issue either with @ry-dgel autocmd Solution and without.
I'm running let g:gruvbox_termcolors = 16 and I guess this setshighlight Normal ctermfg=15 ctermbg=0 and when reversed in the airline theme it uses the bold version of this color (8) for the mode foreground resulting in these:

So for me the solution was to define a different color for the background, like so:
hi Normal ctermbg=236
This will make the bold color be 236 too and now works fine.

[normen]

I am having the same issue when enabling transparency. The autocmd solution works somewhat but when I open a :term it reverts back to the old behavior of displaying wrong colors.

[3ximus]

@normen Do you by any chance use the terminal for fzf only ? That was my case and for that I added an option to fzf.vim plugin to prevent it from using the terminal when available

[normen]

No, I am using a zsh with only a few options. I moved from airline to lightline and that seemed to fix the issue, plus some others 😄