CMake syntax highlighting not working as expected

Question

For most files, Vim (terminal) is syntax highlighting properly without any issues. However, I am unable to get it to work for CMakeLists.txt:

Neovim has no trouble with syntax highlighting, neither does gvim. I also tried this plugin with no effect: https://github.com/pboettch/vim-cmake-syntax

I have the following in my .vimrc

filetype plugin indent on
syntax on
set t_Co=256
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.cmake,CMakeLists.txt set filetype=cmake
# tried this variation too
# autocmd BufEnter *.cmake,CMakeLists.txt,*.cmake.in :setlocal filetype=cmake

Answer 1

The issue it turns out is a conflict with the Rainbow Parenthesis plugin: https://github.com/kien/rainbow_parentheses.vim, which is too bad as it's a nice plugin but the syntax highlighting functionality is more important.

For future reference, the following variant of the Rainbow Parenthesis plugin is also problematic: https://github.com/luochen1990/rainbow

Answer 2

https://github.com/luochen1990/rainbow/issues/77

If using https://github.com/luochen1990/rainbow, we can turn it off for cmake language.

A workaround (as @luochen1990 already noted): Disable the rainbow plugin for CMake files.

let g:rainbow_conf = {
\   'separately': {
\       'cmake': 0,
\   }
\}