Vim in Color

Posted by admin on September 30, 2007 under Tech Tips | Be the First to Comment

Turing on colored syntax highlighting in Vim can make it easier when looking through complicated text files, scripts, and source code. To quickly turn on or off the feature, use the “syntax” command within Vim:

:syntax on
:syntax off

The results are great. Here’s a screenshot of Vim in color.

To make the feature permanent, edit the file /etc/vim/vimrc, or as your Vim package maintainer may suggest, /etc/vim/vimrc.local. One can also make the change simply for their user only by editing ~/.vimrc. In all cases, simply add the following line at the end of the file:

:syntax on

Users of Ubuntu by default have vim-tiny, which as it’s name suggests, is a smaller version of the Vim editor. This version does not support syntax highlighting and a number of other features. Of course, remedying this is very easy by installing the full featured vim:

# sudo apt-get install vim

Happy editing.