How do I make a vim command run automatically with .vimrc?

Question

I run the following vim command to change the colour of highlighted columns to something more palatable than the default red:

:highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=235 guibg=#2c2d27

rather than run this manually everytime I start vim, I'd like to automate this. But how? I've tried adding the following to .vimrc:

highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=235 guibg=#2c2d27

But that has no effect (no errors, it's just ignored after restart). Am I doing something wrong? I got the command from this Q:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2447109/showing-a-different-background-colour-in-vim-past-80-characters

But it didn't seem to shed light on my particular problem.

Answer 1

You need to select a colorscheme prior to adding any highlight commands in your .vimrc file.

Example

colorscheme desert
highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=235 guibg=#2c2d27

References

• How do I change my Vim highlight line to not be an underline?

Answer 2

It seems that your colorscheme had overrided your configuration. You can override it by the way in @slm's answer or create another configuration for colorscheme in ~/.vim/after/colors/<colorscheme name>.vim.

But you can always override settings in all colorscheme by adding this line to your .vimrc:

autocmd ColorScheme * highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=235 guibg=#2d2d27