Therefore, you need a way to specify these segments of code, and the “product” portion of the highlight command lets you specify these regions.īefore moving on to some more complicated examples, note that I included the syntax enable command at the end of that example. If you’re familiar with Java - or any other programming language - you’ll know that it consists of things like comments, constants, variables, and many more things. For instance, imagine you’re editing a Java file. ' this next line is needed to enable your custom colors:īecause vim supports syntax highlighting, it makes sense that groups like these need to be specified. This highlight command can be read as “When using a color terminal (cterm), set the background terminal color (ctermbg) to Blue for the ‘Normal’ group.”Īt first blush the word “Normal” may not make much sense, but if I add in a few more groups, I think you’ll see the power of groups: Let’s look at a sample command to help us get rolling: The highlight commands are powerful, you need a little bit of background information to learn how to use them. The next thing to know is that you control the vim colors using a command named highlight. Either file will be located in your home directory on a Unix or Linux system. On older Unix systems the vi configuration file was named. You can control your vim color settings in your vim startup file. If you’re interested in choosing a vim color scheme, or figuring out which colorschemes are available on your system, please see my vi/vim color scheme (colorscheme) tutorial.

Note: This tutorial is about how to manually configure vim color settings. In this article I'll try to demonstrate how you can change the colors in vim to be a little more pleasing, or at least be more in your control.

When using vim syntax highlighting, a common complaint is that the default color scheme is a little too bold.

This code changes the cursorline color when in insert, normal and replace mode at least but doesn't really work in visual mode and doesn't work at all in command mode.Vim colors FAQ: Can you provide details on how to control/configure colors in the vim editor (i.e., vim color settings)? _command('hi! CursorLine guifg=NONE guibg='.

Change cursor column color vim