Highlighting python code blocks in vim

Question

I wanted to highlight different indentation levels in vim, so I could identify large blocks of code more easily. I have some reasonable large nested for/while/with/try blocks and it gets hard to identify the block a am into, i.e. how many 'tabs' I have before the cursor.

Is there a way to highlight tabs?

This is what I have in mind:

try:
*   while True:
*   *   for foo in bar:
*   *   *   do()
*   if something:
*   *   done()
except bla:
*   exit()

Where * would be a special background color.

I would also settle for any other way to identify the indentation levels.

Answer 1

The Indent Guides vim plug-in does exactly this kind of highlighting. I use it together with the listchars option (as Ackar pointed out).

Answer 2

You can use the listchars options to display specifics characters (see :help listchars).

For example if you want to show tabs you could use :

:set listchars=tab:*\     " Be careful : there is a space after the backslash
:set list

You can also change the highlighting colors using the highlight property for the SpecialKey group.

If you use vim in a terminal :

:highlight SpecialKey ctermfg=Cyan

See :help highlight for more informations.

You can also check :runtime syntax/colortest.vim to see all the available colors.