Plugin for showing marks by *highlighting entire line*, instead of using signcolumn?

Question

I write code mostly on my laptop for portability. It's a small monitor, so plugins that use the "sign column" tend to take up too much space. For example, I have my Syntastic plugin configured to highlight lines with syntax errors in red and show a message at the bottom, rather than indicating errors in the signcolumn.

Is there a plugin for navigation between marks, for which I can do something similar -- just highlight the entire line in one or two colors? Generally, I won't be using more than a couple marks in an entire file because I won't remember where they are, and I can navigate lines that fit on the screen with simple j/k commands.

Maybe I can insert a few lines into my .vimrc myself -- for example, trigger a special syntax coloring wherever "mark A" is?

Answer 1

There is a pretty quick and dirty way using \%'a:

for c in map(range(char2nr('a'), char2nr('z')), 'nr2char(v:val)')
    call matchadd('Search', '^.*\%'."'".c.'.*$')
endfor

Replace Search with an appropriate highlighting group. You can also replace the map(range(...)) with any set of marks you want, e.g., ['A', 'B'].

A few caveats:

• Only highlights behind characters, not to the end of the screen.
• Updates only when cursor is moved.