Here is my .vimrc
1 syntax on
2 set ts=4
3 set number
4 set smartindent
5 set shiftwidth=4
However, I tried to edit HelloWorld.java
and HelloWorld.c
. Both have pure regular black font. No any highlighting!
I also tried :syntax on
after the vim is open, but no luck.
\>vim -version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15)
\>cat /etc/*-release
openSUSE 11.4 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11.4
CODENAME = Celadon
When you edit the file, are you using
vim filename
This can matter. In some server configurations, if you do vi filename
you get vim, but it's a very stripped down version of vim that is very much like the original vi (which does not, among other things, do syntax coloring). On a system configured in this way, if you instead type vim filename
, you get the full featured vim.
I just worked through this with a person who was on a server that had the vim-minimal package installed as well as another vim package. I suspect (but did not verify that) the vim-minimal
package installed its executable as /bin/vi
.
The difference was very clear when you looked at the actual files (i.e. ls -l /bin/vi
vs ls -l /usr/bin/vim
)--one was about ten times the size. Both of them were actually vim, same version number and everything, but the /bin/vi one was compiled with very few features enabled.
To make it even more confusing:
vi existing.pl
opened the .pl file, gave no syntax coloring
vi [enter]
gave the vim splash screen, and from there
:e existing.pl
opened the file with syntax coloring on.
A comment from Jan Wilamowski suggests checking by doing:
vi --version
If that shows that the syntax feature was not compiled in, try
vim --version
and see if it is compiled in there.
You'll need to install the vim-data
package on openSUSE for vim syntax colouring to work.
Sounds strange, I know that this is not pulled in by default with the vim package but AFAIK it's for people who want to create tiny base installs.
Package vim-data contains the runtime files.
Also make sure your remote environment has an appropriate TERM
variable set TERM=screen-256color, TERM=xterm, TERM=xterm-256color should all work just fine with ssh and ssh with screen/tmux.
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