Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Enable syntax higlighting for Vim in Ubuntu

Ubuntu comes with a minimal Vim installation known as tiny Vim. This doesn't have features like syntax highlighting and GUI. Tiny Vim is more compatible with Vi because most of the features that Vim adds to Vi are not there. So people looking for standard Vi may like it but I like to have syntax higlighting and to use arrow keys to move in the document rather than ctrl key. So if you want these features you will need to install complete Vim. You can do that using the following command:
sudo apt-get install vim-full
if at some point you want to turn highlighting off, issue following command from inside vim:
:syn off
to turn it back on you can use:
:syn on
Good luck