Vim - change status line colours in .vimrc?

Question

From this question : How can I change vim status line colour? I learnt how to change the status line colouring, like this :

hi StatusLine ctermbg=3 ctermfg=4

That's fine but how can I do that for every window, all the time rather than having to apply the command for each new window that I open. I would expect to do this in .vimrc but I can't work out how to .

I'm running vim in a terminal not a gui; I'm using desert as a colorscheme.

ANSWER!: After the answers offered by Ingo and Kent reassured me that I was doing the right thing it still didn't work. Then I discovered I had a line in my vimrc which read

set background = dark

I'm not sure why that was in there but when I commented it out I got the status line colours I wanted.

NOT THE ANSWER !: Hmm OK. I've just discovered that making that change to .vimrc does indeed give me the right colours when I was editting vimrc but when I edit python files the status colours are gone. I'm guessing this is something to do with filetypes=on ?

Either way I'll have to re-ask this question when I have more time to think about it but it seems the 'set background = dark' thing was a problem but it's not the entire solution.

For what's worth my vimrc looks like this :

colorscheme desert
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.py syntax on
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.py set ai
autocmd BufRead *.py set smartindent cinwords=if,elif,else,for,while,with,try,except,finally,def,class
set tabstop=4
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4
filetype indent on
"GLAUCON START
:set ignorecase "make searches case insensitive by default
:set incsearch
:set hlsearch
" Returns true if paste mode is enabled
function! HasPaste()
    if &paste
        return 'PASTE MODE  '
    en
        return ''
endfunction
" Always show the status line
set laststatus=2
" Format the status line
set statusline=\ %{HasPaste()}%F%m%r%h\ %w\ \ CWD:\ %r%{getcwd()}%h\ \ \ Line:\ %l
hi StatusLine ctermbg=3 ctermfg=4
"set background=dark
"GLAUCON END

Kent Kent · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-27T11:10:49

I think the StatusLine is ok (with big S). the problem is (I guess):

you put the hi StatusLin... before your colorscheme desert call. so that the colorscheme overwrites your statusline highlighting.

You should put it after the colorscheme desert in your .vimrc

Vim - change status line colours in .vimrc?

2 Answers