How do you clear highlighting if you edit text?

Question

I find it obnoxious that highlight search stays on until you manually turn it off. If I have edited some text after searching, 99% of the time that means I found what I was looking for and I don't need highlighting anymore. How can I make it so highlighting turns off when I edit a file? Here's what I tried, but for some reason it doesn't seem to have an effect.

augroup allfiles
    autocmd!
    autocmd TextChanged,TextChangedI * :nohl
augroup END

Answer 1

:help noh explains why this isn't working.

  :noh[lsearch]     Stop the highlighting for the 'hlsearch' option.  It
        is automatically turned back on when using a search
        command, or setting the 'hlsearch' option.
        This command doesn't work in an autocommand, because
        the highlighting state is saved and restored when
        executing autocommands |autocmd-searchpat|.
        Same thing for when invoking a user function.

You may be interested in the plugin https://github.com/romainl/vim-cool . The basic trick is to use feedkeys and a <plug> mapping with execute(:

inoremap <expr> <Plug>(StopHL) execute('nohlsearch')[-1]
fu! StopHL()
    if !v:hlsearch || mode() isnot 'n'
        return
    endif
    sil call feedkeys("\<Plug>(StopHL)", 'm')
endfu
au InsertEnter * call StopHL()

From https://github.com/romainl/vim-cool/issues/9#issue-196870339 .