I find vim’s matching parenthesis highlighting feature useful, but the default colors drive me nuts!

It highlights the matching brace/bracket so vividly, I keep on getting confused with the cursor position!

Here are a few solutions to this annoyance.

Change the matching parenthesis font color and/or text-style

To customize the font color, background color and/or text-style of the matching brace/bracket highlighting feature in vim, place the following in the .vimrc file in your home directory (replace STYLE, FGCOL and BGCOL with your preference).

:hi MatchParen cterm=STYLE ctermbg=BGCOL ctermfg=FGCOL

STYLE can be ‘none’, ‘underline’ or ‘bold’.

FGCOL and BGCOL can be ‘none’, or the name of the desired color.

Example 1: Display matching parenthesis in bold text

:hi MatchParen cterm=bold ctermbg=none ctermfg=none

Example 2: Display matching parenthesis in underlined text

:hi MatchParen cterm=underline ctermbg=none ctermfg=none

Example 3: Display matching parenthesis with custom font color

:hi MatchParen cterm=none ctermbg=none ctermfg=white

And you can figure the rest out.

Turn off matching parenthesis highlighting

To completely disable the matching brace/bracket highlighting feature in vim, place the following in the .vimrc file in your home directory.

let g:loaded_matchparen=1

Tags: editor, Linux, syntax highlighting, UNIX, vi, vim

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Linux, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.