>console login - changing the screen size
When I log in, the entire width of the screen is used so I'm not sure how to answer that part of the question. But as far as enabling text coloring in vim, add this line to your .bash_profile:

export TERM="xterm-256color"


Terminal does that automatically for you, but you have to do it yourself in this mode.

Edit - screen width in vim

To set the screen width in vim, add this line to your .vimrc file:

set columns=XXX


Where "XXX" is the number of columns you want.