Vim: Highlight keyword pairs in Ruby (def/end, do/end, etc)

Question

In one of the Eclipse-based editors that I tried out recently (I think it was RubyMine), when a Ruby keyword that either opened or closed a method or block was selected, the corresponding open/close keyword was highlighted. Similar to the way that Vim is able to highlight a corresponding open/close parenthesis.

For instance, if I selected a 'def', it would highlight the corresponding 'end'. It also worked for do/end blocks.

This was really handy, especially for those long and sometimes heavily nested Rspec files.

Does anybody know how to achieve this in Vim?

Answer 1

If you are using Vim 7.3, you should have the MatchIt vim macro available.

Add runtime macros/matchit.vim to your .vimrc file and you should be able to use % to match the ruby blocks.

You can look at the filetype plugin for ruby to see what it will move between.