Vim Recipes ‣ Display ‣ Redefining Highlight Groups

Redefining Highlight Groups

Problem

You want to change the colours of specific elements of the display. For example, you want text to be white on a black background.

Solution

Use the :highight group definition command.

A highlight group (group) is an element of the display whose colours can be customised. Some of the default highlight groups are:

Is a list the right way to present this?

Cursor

Character under the cursor.

ErrorMsg

Command line error messages.

Normal

Normal text.

Visual

Text selected under Visual mode.

The definition is a list of key-value pairs. For example, the following sets the terminal foreground colour to black and the terminal background colour to yellow:

:highlight Normal ctermfg=black ctermbg=yellow

These are some common arguments:

ctermfg

Terminal foreground colour.

ctermbg

Terminal background colour.

term

Terminal font style, e.g. bold, italic, underline.

guifg

GUI foreground colour.

guibg

GUI background colour.

Apart from term, these arguments take a colour name or number as a value. Recognised colour names include black, brown, grey, blue, green, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white.

The arguments that are not supplied retain their previous values. For example, :highlight Normal\ ctermbg=white changes the background colour to white, but keeps the previous foreground colour.

Let's look at some examples:

• :highlight Visual term=bold - Text that has been selected using Visual mode is rendered in bold.
• :highlight Comment ctermfg=grey ctermbg=white term=bold - Comments are rendered in bold, grey text.

Discussion

Normally you'll select a colour scheme, and not define highlighting groups at all. Occasionally, though, you want more control over colours or need to edit a syntax file. That's where the :highlight command comes in.

Before you change highlight groups you may like to check their current values. You can do this with :highlight group. To view all current settings use :highlight.

Defining a Highlight Group

You can define your own highlight group by using the :highlight command as described above with a group name of your choice. To select what is highlighted you use :match group /pattern/. For example:

:highlight Elephant ctermbg=grey ctermfg=white
  :match Elephant /\celephant/

This renders all occurrences of the word elephant, regardless of case due to the \c escape, in white on grey.