syntax highlighting doesn't work after restore a previous vim session

Question

since dividing and loading each windows every time are kinda bothersome, I saved my session using:

mksession ~/session1.vim

and restored it using:

vim -S session1.vim

or

source session1.vim

it restores the previous session perfectly, but doesn't show any syntax highlighting at all.

I found a similar question over here: No syntax highlighting after session restore in terminal but doesn't help much.

does anyone have any idea?

Answer 1

I had the same problem; if I saved sessions without 'options' in sessionoptions, when I reloaded Vim, the buffers were reloaded, but without syntax highlighting.

The solution is to use an autocmd with nested when reloading.

Wikia has an extensive article about loading and saving sessions. The 'nested' option is mentioned at the bottom.

I use a modified version of this StackOverflow answer, here it is:

fu! SaveSess()
  execute 'mksession! ' . getcwd() . '/.session.vim'
endfunction

fu! RestoreSess()
  if filereadable(getcwd() . '/.session.vim')
    execute 'so ' . getcwd() . '/.session.vim'
    if bufexists(1)
      for l in range(1, bufnr('$'))
        if bufwinnr(l) == -1
          exec 'sbuffer ' . l
        endif
      endfor
    endif
  endif
endfunction

autocmd VimLeave * call SaveSess()
autocmd VimEnter * nested call RestoreSess()

set sessionoptions-=options  " Don't save options

Answer 2

I can across this Issue using the Obsession vim plugin and Neovim aswell. The answer in this thread helped me finding the solution although in my case the solution provided here didn't work immediately.

I took a look at the sessionoptions help page. For me the setting that fixed the problem was set sessionoptions+=localoptions. Then after reloading vim with this option in the config and after reloading the syntax highlighting, the highlighting was saved in the session.