How to set vim highlight ColorColumn guideline transparency?

Question

I have set :highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=1, but the guideline is too much dimmed. How to increase the vim guideline transparency, so I can see better which characters it has behind it?

Alternatively, the setcolumn guideline could be like in Sublime Text, just a thin line:

Answer 1

Vim doesn't use transparency for the color settings, in this case you are setting the color to ANSI 1, or Red. If the syntax highlighting on top is close to the same color it will be hard to read.

On my system I have the background and black configured slightly different so find good results by using ANSI 16:

highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=16

Or if you have a 256 color terminal:

highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=238

Which might look like this:

Answer 2

You might also start with a colorscheme where the hard work has been done for you.

:colorscheme CTRL-D # will list available

Add to your .vimrc

colorscheme zellner

You might also copy to your distros share folder so not overwritten by the next vim update, eg on Fedora /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/colors/. Once in a while, these are updated in a way you may not like, like recently, zellner itself.