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

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.

leopard-vim-syntax-highlighting

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””

  1. 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

  2. Thank you, Simon!

  3. Awesome tip thanks!

  4. Thank you so much for this!!!

  5. You may also need to go into Terminal perferences > Settings > Text and enable “Display ANSI colors”.

  6. Again. Thanks. This also worked perfectly.

  7. thanks, it works

  8. Thanks!
    Really simple and helpfull

  9. Thanks a lot! It works

  10. Sure, I’m glad you guys found it useful!

  11. 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!

  12. nice. thanks :)

  13. That’s fantastic. Thanks.

  14. Thanks a lot. Was a great help.

  15. 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.

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  1. Dmitry Dulepov (dmitryd) « Enable syntax highlighting and other options in vim on Mac OS X 10.... « Chat Catcher - 22 Dec 2009

    [...] 2009-12-22T04:33:47 Enable vim (vi) syntax highlighting on Mac OS X: [link to post] [...]

  2. Helmut Hummel (helhum) « Enable syntax highlighting and other options in vim on Mac OS X 10.... « Chat Catcher - 22 Dec 2009

    [...] 2009-12-22T04:33:47 RT @dmitryd: Enable vim (vi) syntax highlighting on Mac OS X: [link to post] [...]

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