set background=dark

Well, since I'm on the topic of Vim ...

I use Vim on lots of different computers: Windows machines, Solaris machines, Red Hat server machines, Ubuntu desktop machines. On my Windows machines, I use both Vim and gVim, kind of interchangeably. On the other machines, I generally use only Vim ("console Vim", that is), and I tend to be using either XTerms or Putty SSH sessions.

For some of my machines, I tend to have Putty configured so that its SSH sessions look like xterms, and I have my xterms configured to run with a black background:

XTerm*background:black

This seems to work quite well, but Vim's default syntax coloring options for console mode doesn't work very well with black-background terminals.

Well, just the other day, I discovered that Vim has a built-in workaround for this problem:

:set background=dark

Works like a charm!