Enable Vim Syntax Highlighting By Default

Question

Edit your $HOME/.vimrc (Unix/Linux/OSX) or $HOME/_vimrc (Windows) to include the following line:

syntax on

EDIT

If your syntax highlighting doesn't work when you start Vim, you probably don't have a $HOME/.vimrc or $HOME/_vimrc (known collectively as vimrc from now on). In that case, you have two options:

• Create an empty vimrc.
• Copy vimrc_example.vim as your vimrc (recommended, thanks @oyenamit). You can find vimrc_example.vim in the runtime directory.

The location of the runtime directory varies between operating systems:

• On my system (Arch Linux, and Mac, thanks @totophe), it's in /usr/share/vim/vim73.
• On Windows, it's in \Program Files\Vim\vim73.

Also, to highlight the syntax of a Specific File TYPE (or programming language extension), you can use following commands, while file is already opened in Vim and you want to try syntax highlighting on the fly:

:set filetype=php

OR shortcut:

:se ft=php

Above commands will change the syntax-highlighting for currently opened file as it should be for PHP code.

Uncommenting the "syntax on" in vimrc file.

Move to the directory,

cd /etc/vim/

vim vimrc

now search "syntax" and uncomment it. Save it and reopen the file in vim.

For anyone that gets here because of TurnKeyLinux using vim-tiny which doesn't have the syntax module enabled try this article to install full vim

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/support/20140108/solved-bash-command-not-found-after-replacing-package

tl;dr

# apt-get remove vim-tiny
# apt-get install vim
# hash vim
# vim

I also found that this is one of the lessons in vimtutor.

To find it, you can type command vimtutor in your Terminal (I used on Mac), and scroll down to see if there is a lesson called CREATE A STARTUP SCRIPT (for me it was Lesson 7.2), where it describes how to set up an initial vimrc file.