@richeney I was looking for a solution for exactly this! I would prefer to edit with syntax highlighting. Same symptoms - I have a colorscheme (gruvbox) and a filetype (ps1) yet no color.

Currently CloudShell support supports default vim color scheme. If you want more colors in your shell, please follow the instructions below and install the color schemes you like.

Step-1: Create "colors" dir in your homedir. Change cwd to colos dir.

• cd .vim
• mkdir colors
• cd colors

Step-2: Perform wget on the color scheme that you are interested in. Showing an example for lunaperche colors cheme to install.

• wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vim/colorschemes/master/colors/lunaperche.vim

Start using installed color schemes in your vim.

I should have mentioned that I am comfortably using .vim file. (I created my own cloudshell colorscheme to match the standard colours, which I install using an Ansible role.)

The issue with the Cloud Shell image is that there is

1. only desert (and any user installed schemes)

   In vim if you type :colo it will show the current scheme; :colo and CTRL+D then it lists out the available schemes.

2. no syntax highlighting

WSL running jammy

• syntax highlighting ✅
• full set of schemes ✅

Cloud Shell in Windows Terminal

• syntax highlighting ❌
• full set of schemes ❌

Cloud Shell in the browser

• syntax highlighting ❌
• full set of schemes ❌

@hima-gadupudi, would you reopen the issue?

Lack of syntax highlighting support in Azure Cloud Shell's vim is still an issue.

#384 proposes adding the vim-extra package to the Cloud Shell base image to resolve this issue.

In the interim, one could manually install vim runtime files in their Cloud Shell home directory as described at https://www.vim.org/runtime.php. I'm familiar with vim / runtime version compatibility guarantees; if one wants to install the version of the runtime associated with their exact version of vim, the instructions could be adapted thus:

$ vim --version | head -n 2
VIM - Vi IMproved 9.0 (2022 Jun 28, compiled Mar  1 2024 01:01:28)
Included patches: 1-2121
$ VIMVERSION=$(vim --version | awk 'NR==1 {v=$5; FS="-"} NR == 2 {t=$2} END {print v "." t}')
$ echo $VIMVERSION
9.0.2121
$ mkdir -p ~/.vim
$ wget -O - https://github.com/vim/vim/archive/refs/tags/v${VIMVERSION}.tar.gz | tar -C ~/.vim -xzf -  vim-${VIMVERSION}/runtime/ --strip-components=2