thank you for the replies, guys.

ok, i meant to say that i've already compiled and installed vim-6.3 from source. when i open some c source and type :syntax on, no colors show up...it merely underlines some keywords and boldfaces some others...still all black and white.

your cecho script works though. so this leads me to believe that vim needs to be recompiled with some flag saying that it will be run on an ANSI terminal?

also, will compiling/installing bash from source allow me to have "normal" tab completion? =) are there any weird caveats to installing a new shell?

thanks again.