In the Vim and Emacs terminal apps, the color schemes look horrid. How do I enable the colors to be as vibrant as the GUI version (or more than 8 colors for that matter)?
Should I just give up, and move over to their respective GUI applications? And if so, which?
You can't have more colors in the terminal, because there are only ANSI codes for 8 colors (16 if you count bold/light). If you want to customize the colors, you can use the TerminalColours plugin from http://ciaranwal.sh/2007/11/01/customising-colours-in-leopard-terminal
Personally, I prefer to use the so-called Carbon Emacs on my Mac. There are several builds available; Google is your friend. I get mine from http://www.porkrind.org/emacs/
You are possibly being inhibited by the fact you are running in a VT100/WhateverItsCalled compatible terminal and it just doesn't have more than about 16 foreground and 16 background colours. If it did, the lovely library "CaCa" ( ColourAsciiColourArt ) would be much more pleasing to watch than it is.
If you want more colours, you simply have to use more modern technology, and this generally means using X ( unless your loving pain and want to use directfb/framebuffer/svgalib ).
For vim, there is GVim ( GTK+Vim ). Emacs GUI version however displeases me much, but I'm not an emacs user.