Enable syntax highlighting and other options in vim on Mac OS X 10.5.* “Leopard”

10 Mar 2009 18 Comments

Vim is a popular UNIX command line text editor with an interface that is based not on menus or icons but on commands given in a text user interface.

Unfortunately the vim that ships with Mac OS X 10.5.* (Leopard) doesn’t have an optimized configuration file to allow for syntax highlighting, auto indentation, etc.

To fix this, open a new Terminal window and enter these commands to open vim’s configuration file:

cd /usr/share/vim
 
sudo vim vimrc

Press the ‘i‘ key to switch vim to Insertion Mode, then enter these lines below the ‘set backspace=2‘ line:

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
 
" When editing a file, always jump to the last cursor position
autocmd BufReadPost *
\ if ! exists("g:leave_my_cursor_position_alone") |
\ if line("'\"") > 0 && line ("'\"") <= line("$") |
\ exe "normal g'\"" |
\ endif |
\ endif

Press the Escape key to take vim out of Insertion Mode, then press ‘:‘ (colon) followed by ‘x‘ to save the file and exit. Enter this command again:

sudo vim vimrc

… and you’ll see that vim now automatically indents code, displays the cursor position, has syntax highlighting, etc.

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18 Responses to “Enable syntax highlighting and other options in vim on Mac OS X 10.5.* “Leopard””

Simon Reply 11 Mar 2009 at 06:33
by the look of your screenshot you probably want this too:
set background=dark
and it might be worth mentioning that ~/.vimrc is a place to put user specific vim configuration
willem Reply 11 Mar 2009 at 12:04

Thank you, Simon!
D. Starr Reply 11 Mar 2009 at 20:45

Awesome tip thanks!
Mark Reply 24 May 2009 at 00:17

Thank you so much for this!!!
bitwonk Reply 04 Jun 2009 at 01:02

You may also need to go into Terminal perferences > Settings > Text and enable “Display ANSI colors”.
Dave Reply 29 Jun 2009 at 04:31

Again. Thanks. This also worked perfectly.
herik Reply 25 Aug 2009 at 06:01

thanks, it works
Matelot Reply 08 Sep 2009 at 19:44

Thanks!
Really simple and helpfull
Dipak Reply 02 Nov 2009 at 04:18

Thanks a lot! It works
Willem Reply 02 Nov 2009 at 09:13

Sure, I’m glad you guys found it useful!
Jacques Reply 25 Nov 2009 at 02:57

Thanks so much! This will save me so many headaches. All the other solutions I was finding involved installing SIMBL and other things, which I knew couldn’t have been right because it was for Terminal, and vim access on other machines were still showing syntax highlighting, so I knew it had to be my local vim.

Thanks again!
Senthil Reply 07 Dec 2009 at 12:48

nice. thanks
Sean Reply 19 Dec 2009 at 09:26

That’s fantastic. Thanks.
Justin Dorfman Reply 30 Dec 2009 at 19:09

Awesome. Thanks.
Asha Reply 05 Feb 2010 at 05:14

Thanks a lot. Was a great help.
Derek Reply 30 Jun 2010 at 05:13

The syntax highlighting is only working for me when I run vim as root, e.g. `sudo vim whatever.txt` vs `vim whatever.txt`. Any idea why? The vimrc file has +r for everyone.