title: Vim - change status line colours in .vimrc?
body: <p>From this question : <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/9065941/364088">How can I change vim status line colour?</a> I learnt how to change the status line colouring, like this :</p>
  
  <pre><code>hi StatusLine ctermbg=3 ctermfg=4
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That's fine but how can I do that for every window, all the time rather than having to apply the command for each new window that I open. I would expect to do this in .vimrc but I can't work out how to .</p>
  
  <p>I'm running vim in a terminal not a gui; I'm using desert as a colorscheme.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>ANSWER!:
  After the answers offered by Ingo and Kent reassured me that I was doing the right thing it still didn't work. Then I discovered I had a line in my vimrc which read </p>
  
  <p>set background = dark</p>
  
  <p>I'm not sure why that was in there but when I commented it out I got the status line colours I wanted.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>NOT THE ANSWER !</strong>:
  Hmm OK. I've just discovered that making that change to .vimrc does indeed give me the right colours when I was editting vimrc but when I edit python files the status colours are gone. I'm guessing this is something to do with filetypes=on ?</p>
  
  <p>Either way I'll have to re-ask this question when I have more time to think about it but it seems the 'set background = dark' thing was a problem but it's not the entire solution.</p>
  
  <p>For what's worth my vimrc looks like this :</p>
  
  <pre>
  colorscheme desert
  autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.py syntax on
  autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.py set ai
  autocmd BufRead *.py set smartindent cinwords=if,elif,else,for,while,with,try,except,finally,def,class
  set tabstop=4
  set expandtab
  set shiftwidth=4
  filetype indent on
  "GLAUCON START
  :set ignorecase "make searches case insensitive by default
  :set incsearch
  :set hlsearch
  " Returns true if paste mode is enabled
  function! HasPaste()
      if &paste
          return 'PASTE MODE  '
      en
          return ''
  endfunction
  " Always show the status line
  set laststatus=2
  " Format the status line
  set statusline=\ %{HasPaste()}%F%m%r%h\ %w\ \ CWD:\ %r%{getcwd()}%h\ \ \ Line:\ %l
  hi StatusLine ctermbg=3 ctermfg=4
  "set background=dark
  "GLAUCON END
  </pre>