How to turn on syntax highlighting in VIM 7.3 OSX

vim

System = OSX 10.9.4

I am trying to turn on syntax highlighting in vim while using the terminal. However, I am unable to get it to work properly.

Things I've tried:

located the vimrc file and added the following code:

 set ai                  " auto indenting 
 set history=100         " keep 100 lines of history
 set ruler               " show the cursor position
 syntax on               " syntax highlighting
 set hlsearch            " highlight the last searched term
 filetype plugin on      " use the file type plugins

Located vimrc under directory:
```
 cd /usr/share/vim/
```

The interesting thing is that once I add the code to the vimrc using vim, followed by exiting (x), and re-opening the file again, syntax is correctly highlighted in the vimrc.

However, when I try to make a new vim file called "test", copy the same code, save and exit. Re-open it, the syntax is not highlighted at all.

It appears that syntax highlighting only works when I open the actually vimrc file—and not when I try to create a new one or open another file that should have syntax highlighting.

I've also tried to create a .vimrc (exact copy) under the ~/ (directory). No success.
Made a new file called "test" and tried turning it on while active as well:
```
   vim test 
```

"then within vim"

       :syntax on

I am really confused as to why this partially works.

Any help is much appreciated.

Cheers!

p.s. I have followed these instructions as well from: http://geekology.co.za/article/2009/03/how-to-enable-syntax-highlighting-and-other-options-in-vim

*I am aware of macvim, but would like a solution for the native vim in terminal. Thanks.

Best Answer

NEVER do anything in $VIM as it will work only by luck, cause unexpected behaviors and likely be overwritten next time Vim is updated.

What you have put in /usr/share/vim/vimrc should be in ~/.vimrc.
filetype on and syntax on are the bare minimum you need in your ~/.vimrc for syntax highlighting to work.
$ vim ~/.vimrc gives you syntax highlighting because the file is recognized by Vim as a vim file. Filetype detection is mostly dependent on file extensions so you can't expect any syntax highlighting in a file called test.

$ vim test.py, on the other hand, should give you syntax highlighting.

If the filetype is not detected, you can force it with :set filetype=python.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

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Use \r instead of \n.

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Use `\r` instead of `\n`.