Mac Terminal nightmare with 256 color

Story behind story :-

I use Mac OSX 10.6.8 and for working I ssh to a RHEL 4.8 server. Recently I tried out solarized which is a set of themes for vim, Mac Terminal app etc. It looks so elegant that I fell in love with it. Solarized has dark and light color themes with 256 color and 8 color support mode. I have been happily using the theme until I logged into my RHEL development server and opened vim. A blank, dark and gloomy screen awaited me. There were no text displayed and I was like a newly blinded man trying to walk. Even after quitting vim I bash prompt was screwed. I had to use reset command to revert the damage.

I knew that something was messing up the color terminal settings. Searching through vim man pages guided me to this setting vim -T builtin_xterm. Basically we can tell vim which terminal we are using. This fixed the terminal screw up in my RHEL box. An alias to vim made my life easy.

Then came the next shock. Inside gnu screen display started breaking again. Frantic google search pointed me to various links showing scrrenrc settings for setting 256 color support inside screen. But still terminal prompt got screwed up inside screen

Fix:-

Magic fix - use iTerm. It is a nice replacement for Terminal app. Solarized has themes for iTerm also and it works beautifully inside screen. Now my RHEL box also has the beautiful solarized themes.

But still inside screen on RHEL terminal reports its supported color codes as 8. I am going to build screen with 256 color support and see if that can fix it.