How to use italics in vim

Posted on January 25, 2018

Issue

I want to use italics font for my codefocus vim colorscheme. But it does not work in iterm2 terminal.

Solution

Good description of issues that can affect italics font rendering in a terminal is here.

I found out that italics works in iterm2 terminal, because the output of

`echo `tput sitm`italics`tput ritm`

was rendered in italics. But vim rendered italics as “standout” text. The solution is to override the codes vim uses to render font. It is “Step 4” in this article.

set t_ZH=^[[3m
set t_ZR=^[[23m

Note that the character ^[ must be entered with <C-V><Esc>.