After setting .vimrc to have "syntax on" the colors appear. They work even if there is not .vimoutlinerrc file.
I'm not sure what the ideal behavior is here; the minimal fix would be to mention this in a help file. If there's a way to enable the highlighting only for vo files, that would probably be safest. I use vim almost entirely for vimoutliner, and am not very familiar with vim. For users like me, turning the coloring on is desirable behavior. For big vim users who have made a conscious choice not to enable coloring, respecting that is probably desirable behavior. Ross P.S. vim seems to be choosing the right color scheme for both white and black backgrounds, an issue raised in bug 507342. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org