Comments on: Turn on or off color syntax highlighting in vi or vim

By: Diwanker Pandey

Diwanker Pandey — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:38:57 +0000

how to compile c program in fedora 15?

Can anybody help?????

By: Sourav Chakraborty

Sourav Chakraborty — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:10:08 +0000

Thanks for the great tip!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:01:29 +0000

use:
:noh
to turn it off

By: Ginso

Ginso — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:43:42 +0000

hi, when i open a new .tex document, i have a different syntax than, when i open an already existing .tex document. I like the first one better, but typing :set syn=tex gives me the ugly one. Any ideas how i get the other one?

By: Indie

Indie — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:36:03 +0000

If you use sudoedit to edit a file, vim won’t be able to determine what syntax to apply so you need to also do

:set syn=php

By: Rajasekhar

Rajasekhar — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:00:45 +0000

Its working Nice..!! Thank you..!!

By: Satya Prakash

Satya Prakash — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 10:56:42 +0000

To me as well. set syntax=on is working and not just syntax=on

By: Daniel Brockman

Daniel Brockman — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:23:36 +0000

I’m colorblind, and the syntax highlighting just makes the code hard to read.

I hope the next version of VIM lets me specify what color I want for background and what color I want for foreground instead of requiring me to choose from their predefined templates.

Hey! Maybe VIM already lets me specify bg and fg colors! Does anyone know the syntax for the command?

By: Daniel Brockman

Daniel Brockman — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:19:40 +0000

@Senthil

:syntax on and :syntax off don’t work in vi. They are features of vim. vi is ancient, emerging from work by George Colouris and Bill Joy circa 1973 to 1979. It had no color and no understanding of syntax at all. This was an epoch before color was available on computers (except for government supercomputers used to track incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles, perhaps). Vim arrived much later, the first versions appearing in the early 1990s.

Ref: http://www.softpanorama.org/Editors/Vimorama/history.shtml

By: johan

johan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:47:39 +0000

Thank you very much very helpful.

By: Gobikrishnan

Gobikrishnan — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:30:51 +0000

1st checkl you have installed vim by connanding
yum install vim-enhanced
if you got message like “already installed and latest version
Nothing to do”
if not install it ,
then open your .c/ .cpp file and command
:set syntax=on

By: Daniel Brockman

Daniel Brockman — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:54:00 +0000

I’m very glad to have found this blog and to have learned to use syntax off. Those colors were a profound interference for me.

By: Ahamed ishak

Ahamed ishak — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:25:13 +0000

I try. but i didn’t got it. its not working in my Linux OS.
I use Fedora 14.
Plz give me a help to solve this problem

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:25:12 +0000

Thanks! Worked well.

Syntax highlighting is a huge benefit to me. It makes commented and uncommented lines different colors in config files. Much easier for finding which options are enabled.

By: George

George — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 05:04:36 +0000

What kind of idiot decided that we need syntax highlight ?

By: Manoj

Manoj — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 04:28:31 +0000

hi,
I am using fedora 13.I wanted to highlight keywords of my C program, i tried all the above told but i am still unable..pls help me out,I am new to linux

By: dilu

dilu — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:09:03 +0000

thanks all,,,,,, i was using vi in cygwin and syntax on worked…….. lol……….

By: shijitht

shijitht — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:47:37 +0000

add a file name .exrc in home dir
set cindent ” for c indentation(correct spacing)
syntax on ” coloring according to c syntax
set nu ” line numbers

By: Imran

Imran — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:30:38 +0000

I got syntax highlighting turned on on linux VI editor. Thanks!

By: Bubnoff

Bubnoff — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:47:40 +0000

‘syn on/syn off’, instead of typing ‘syntax’, works as well in vim.

Imagine what your boss would think if he/she found out you were getting paid while typing
those three extra letters!!!

Bubnoff