Nvim User Manual: Using Syntax Highlighting

*usr_06.txt* Nvim VIM USER MANUAL - by Bram Moolenaar Using syntax highlighting Black and white text is boring. With colors your file comes to life. This not only looks nice, it also speeds up your work. Change the colors used for the different sorts of text. Print your text, with the colors you see on the screen. |06.1| Switching it on |06.2| No or wrong colors? |06.3| Different colors |06.4| With colors or without colors |06.5| Further reading Next chapter: |usr_07.txt| Editing more than one file Previous chapter: |usr_05.txt| Set your settings Table of contents: |usr_toc.txt| ============================================================================== *06.1* Switching it on Syntax highlighting is enabled by default. Nvim will automagically detect the type of file and load the right syntax highlighting. ============================================================================== *06.2* No or wrong colors? There can be a number of reasons why you don't see colors: - Your terminal does not support colors. Vim will use bold, italic and underlined text, but this doesn't look very nice. You probably will want to try to get a terminal with colors. - Your terminal does support colors, but Vim doesn't know this. Make sure your $TERM setting is correct. For example, when using an xterm that supports colors: > setenv TERM xterm-color < or (depending on your shell): > TERM=xterm-color; export TERM < The terminal name must match the terminal you are using. - The file type is not recognized. Vim doesn't know all file types, and sometimes it's near to impossible to tell what language a file uses. Try this command: > :set filetype < If the result is "filetype=" then the problem is indeed that Vim doesn't know what type of file this is. You can set the type manually: > :set filetype=fortran < To see which types are available, look in the directory $VIMRUNTIME/syntax. For the GUI you can use the Syntax menu. Setting the filetype can also be done with a |modeline|, so that the file will be highlighted each time you edit it. For example, this line can be used in a Makefile (put it near the start or end of the file): > # vim: syntax=make < You might know how to detect the file type yourself. Often the file name extension (after the dot) can be used. See |new-filetype| for how to tell Vim to detect that file type. - There is no highlighting for your file type. You could try using a similar file type by manually setting it as mentioned above. If that isn't good enough, you can write your own syntax file, see |mysyntaxfile|. Or the colors could be wrong: - The colored text is very hard to read. Vim guesses the background color that you are using. If it is black (or another dark color) it will use light colors for text. If it is white (or another light color) it will use dark colors for text. If Vim guessed wrong the text will be hard to read. To solve this, set the 'background' option. For a dark background: > :set background=dark < And for a light background: > :set background=light < Make sure you put this _before_ the ":syntax enable" command, otherwise the colors will already have been set. You could do ":syntax reset" after setting 'background' to make Vim set the default colors again. - The colors are wrong when scrolling bottom to top. Vim doesn't read the whole file to parse

This section of the Nvim user manual discusses how to enable and configure syntax highlighting in Nvim. It covers troubleshooting steps for when colors are not displayed correctly, including checking terminal support, setting the correct terminal type, recognizing file types, and dealing with missing highlighting for a specific file type. It also explains how to adjust colors based on the background color and how to address color issues when scrolling.