OS X + vim + screen in 256 colors

So it’s 2009 and I feel like upgrading to a 256 color terminal.  16 colors just isn’t cutting it anymore – what is this, EGA?  Writing code with the basic Crayola set of colors is painful after awhile, no matter how soft you make the gamma.

Problem: Terminal.app, in all its mildy dysfunctional glory, only supports 8 colors (16 if you count bold).  iTerm has never really “been there” in terms of update speed or polish, but it seems like the next best alternative – rather than running mrxvt in X in Leopard.  Yuck!

It took about an hour to get everything in line, so I decided to write down what I did for the next time I need to do it or for anyone else wanting some pointers.

Here’s the pointers I ended up using myself:

• http://rtlechow.com/2008/12/256-colors-in-vim-inside-screen-in-an-iterm-on-os-x-leopard/ – This was the entirely of the basics, thanks to R.T.  I still needed a few tweaks, though.
• http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html – the altscreen in most terminals will totally hork unless you set the resources (xterm-alikes) and/or the t_t{i,e} termcap strings
• http://blog.notarus.net/2006/09/19/making-iterm-respect-the-backspace/ – Making iTerm respect Delete := Backspace.
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/196357/making-iterm-to-translate-meta-key-in-the-same-way-as-in-other-oses – irssi and other applications need Option to send Esc+, apprently.
• http://cyber.com.au/~twb/words/term256.txt – ncurses-term provides the xterm-256color support for the Ubuntu machines this is used on

Hope this helps someone!  Or future me!