I have a problem with search highlighting in vim. I have used it before but currently it does not work at all.
I have entered :set hlsearch, which is also in my .vimrc file.
I have entered :set hlsearch? and the result is hlsearch, indicating that I have successfully turned the option on. (right?)
I am running vim and not vi, so that is not the problem.
I have searched around but only found people asking about turning OFF search highlighting.
I would appreciate any input as this has been driving me nuts. Thanks!
Edit: highlighting also doesn't work for spellcheck, so evidently it's something global about highlighting.
When you have problems with multiple highlightings (like search and spell in your case), first check the defined highlightings with
:hi
If any groups are wrong or off, check your :colorscheme, and maybe try another.
In the console, color problems are often related to the number of available colors, a hairy problem. Check with
:set t_Co?
Another good tool for checking problems with individual syntax items is the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin.
Related
I have tried well over 15 different colorschemes for vim. I have made all of the correct settings for full color support in terminal. This 'problem' persists in both terminal and gvim. Perhaps it is not a bug and simply the design of the colorschemes themselves, but only one colorscheme I have tried actually has decent highlight support. For example:
In this python class all of the colorschemes will only highlight a couple of things.
wombat only highlights comments and the if.
molokai is extremly dissapointing but at least gets the ints
All of the themes I try are similar to these two except 'Crayon' which compares like so:
Most of the vim color-scheme github pages show previews with highlight support compared to crayon. My question is what might be causing this problem? or is this just the design of the themes themselves?
Syntax highlighting is the combination of two things:
syntax definition, provided by syntax scripts typically found in syntax/ or after/syntax/,
highlighting definition, provided by colorschemes typically found in colors/.
The former defines syntax groups, the latter defines how those groups look.
But those almost never come in pairs so there's no guarantee whatsoever that every possible syntax group is properly handled by every possible colorscheme.
If a colorscheme you like doesn't handle some of the syntax groups you expect it to handle, open an issue or (better) patch it.
So I have been using spf13-vim recently, and I have tried changing the default colorscheme, but for some reason when I do I get strange highlighting of words. The highlighting seems to depend on the filetype such that my .txt and .py file will look different.
As an example, the following image shows the highlighting effect on headnode, clusterRun, bwa, and vt. This only occurs when I alter the colorscheme from default. So is there a way to stop this from happening?
You need to find out which syntax group causes the highlighting. :syn list shows all active groups, but it's easier when you install the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin. When you have the name of the offending syntax group, you can investigate where it comes from; (the last lines of) :scriptnames may help.
If you cannot find the highlighting this way, it may be spell checking; this goes on top of the syntax highlighting. You can list the corresponding highlight groups via
:hi SpellBad | hi SpellCap | hi SpellLocal | hi SpellRare
If you don't want spell checking,
:set nospell
turns it off.
Soap Box
Vim "distributions" like spf-13 and Janus lure you with a quick install and out-of-the-box settings, but you pay the price with increased complexity (you need to understand both Vim's runtime loading scheme and the arbitrary conventions of the distribution) and inflexibility (the distribution may make some things easier, but other things very difficult). Vim is incredibly customizable, using someone else's customization makes no sense.
Comments keyword are damn highlighted in Macvim/terminal vim and keeps on irritating me. I am not a pro in customizing vim, but really want to get rid of them and have subtle grey keywords
You need to find out which syntax group causes the highlighting. :syn list shows all active groups, but it's easier when you install the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin. When you have the name of the offending syntax group, you can investigate where it comes from; (the last lines of) :scriptnames may help.
One solution in your case would be linking the syntax groups to the original Comment group, so that the distinction is lost. This can be done in ~/.vimrc:
:hi link FoundSyntaxGroupHere Comment
Comments were highlighted because of vim javascript plugin and by setting following inside .vimrc file, i am able to stop my comments from getting highlighted
let g:javascript_ignore_javaScriptdoc="1
I develop javascript and just recently I found that I still love to use Terminal Vim instead of MacVim. Then I was totally annoyed when I opened my usual javascript file in the Terminal Vim: the statements of the code are irregularly highlighted with a mysterious color.
Just to clarify that other file types I have opened (e.g. c, html etc.) do not have the problem. I have scoured website but I could not find an answer. This is just so unacceptable, could someone help me out. A million thanks!
My .vimrc screen shot:
You appear to be using Syntastic.
The first line with the red background seems to be marked as an error.
The Error highlight group is very often set to use a red background.
My conclusion is that what you see is exactly what you should see. It is ugly on purpose and designed to look like that: you don't want to miss errors, do you?
However, Syntastic can be set to not use the Error highlighting to mark errors but the "signs" feature instead which is a lot less ugly.
You should have read the Syntastic documentation as it is all explained in plain english:
:help syntastic-error-signs
Also, set background=dark is not very useful (it doesn't change the background color, if that's what you want) and can be removed safely from your ~/.vimrc.
I found out that it was this plugin jslint.vim that caused the text to be highlighted. The problem is that this plugin could not be disabled properly which I thought I did. Thanks to the hint of #romaini, syntactic is a better plugin to check code errors and make proper configuration.
As a side note, for those who would like to use vim solarized color scheme, please use the solarized terminal color scheme first. Otherwise the color scheme won't be displayed properly.
Thank you for all of your comments and answers! Really appreciated.
Try changing your colorscheme. Open the file in Vim, then do
:colorscheme blink
To cycle through all possible colourschemes, type :colorscheme, then a space, then press Tab. When you reach a colorscheme that sounds promising, press Enter, and see if the text looks OK. Keep doing this until you find a colorscheme that you like.
Once you have found a colorscheme that you like, copy its name, and put the following in your .vimrc:
colorscheme name
(name is the name of the colorscheme you like.)
My favourite colorscheme is blink, but there are many good ones. You can even go online and download new ones if the defaults are not good enough.
Seems the syntax are not recognized correctly. Could you try:
:set filetype=javascript
One other thing to look at to make things look better (will change colors not highlighting). Make sure that your terminal reports itself as xterm-256colors. You can check this by typing echo $TERM.
If it doesn't return xterm-256colors go to Preferences -> Settings -> Advanced (tab) on the profile you are using.
Change the drop down at the top to xterm-256colors.
I got a weird vim interface, please take a look at the following image:
How can I remove those red blocks? It's not highlighted search.
What I did is switch from Gentoo to Arch, my ~/.vimrc remain unchanged.
Many thanks!
Looks like you've got spell-checking enabled.
:set nospell
If you want to find who set 'spell' (it's off by default), use:
:verbose set spell?
There's a syntax file that has those strings in it, telling the colorscheme to color them in some special way. The colorscheme defines that special way to be utterly hideous. :)
If you want that text highlighted, just differently, you'll need to edit your colorscheme. If you don't want that text highlighted, you need to remove them from the syntax definition.
Unfortunately I don't know much about that stuff as I'm mostly happy with the defaults on Windows...