How can I make highlighting commands in .vimrc take effect immediately with Vim 7.4?

Question

I have several highlight commands in my .vimrc file. In Vim 7.3, these took effect immediately after Vim had started. After updating to Vim 7.4, this is not the case anymore. Vim uses its default highlighting initially. When I load .vimrc a second time by executing source ~/.vimrc, highlighting works as I want.

You should be able to reproduce this problem using the following steps:

1. Make a copy of your .vimrc file.

2. Replace ~/.vimrc with a file that contains just the line highlight Type ctermfg=28 cterm=bold.

3. Run vim dummy.c in a 256 color terminal (for example GNOME Terminal).

4. Type int into the buffer. The int should appear in regular font and be colored light green, which is not what I want.

5. Enter :source ~/.vimrc. Now the int should appear in bold font and be colored dark green.

According to the article How to control/configure vim colors, it should be okay to just put the highlight commands into .vimrc. The article says that you should put syntax enable after the highlight commands, but this did not make any difference.

My first fix was to prepend each highlight command in .vimrc with autocmd VimEnter *. This worked for some file types, but not for others (C files are an example).

What is the reason for this behavior? How can I have the highlight commands executed when Vim is started such that they take effect for all buffers during the whole Vim session?

Answer 1

This is no definite answer and your problem sounds like issue 542. Apparently you can work around it, by writing your own basic colorscheme, instead of writing those hi ... statements directly into your .vimrc.

Answer 2

Actually you shouldn't put your custom highlights in your vimrc but in customs syntax files.

These files should be located in ~/.vim/after/syntax/filetype.vim where filetype is the expected filetype. If you are mostly satisfied with a syntax file but would like to add a few command you can follow these steps (taken from :h mysyntaxfile-add):

1. Create a directory in there called "after/syntax". For Unix:

    mkdir ~/.vim/after
    mkdir ~/.vim/after/syntax
   

2. Write a Vim script that contains the commands you want to use. For example, to change the colors for the C syntax:

    highlight cComment ctermfg=Green guifg=Green
   

3. Write that file in the "after/syntax" directory. Use the name of the syntax, with ".vim" added. For our C syntax:

    :w ~/.vim/after/syntax/c.vim

That's it. The next time you edit a C file the Comment color will be different. You don't even have to restart Vim.

:h mysyntaxfile is a good place to get information about how to right your own syntax files. Also Learn Vimscript The Hard Way has several chapters on this topic.

Answer 3

For what it's worth, I had this problem with MacVim (8.1.950 (155)). Placing the highlight statement after colorscheme in .vimrc fixed it for me. E.g.:

highlight SpellCap guisp=Yellow
...
colorscheme evening

->

colorscheme evening
...
highlight SpellCap guisp=Yellow

Answer 4

Similar to Halil Özgür's answer, putting the highlight statement after a set background=dark command that I had in my vimrc file worked for me.

macOS, VIM 8.2

EDIT Just found this from the help files:

The ":syntax enable" command will keep your current color settings.  This
allows using ":highlight" commands to set your preferred colors before or
after using this command.  If you want Vim to overrule your settings with the
defaults, use: >
    :syntax on

If you were using syntax on, switching to syntax enable might help.