JSON quotes not hiding and I *want* them to

Question

TL;DR

What I Want:

JSON files to hide their double quotes (") until I enter insert mode on a line, in which event the quotes reappear. I had this behavior on another machine, but I cannot replicate it on a new install of Arch (which I'm sure is not relevant, but context)

What's happening:

Not that:

I see quotes.

---

I have the opposite complaint to this person in that I want quotes to disappear and they won't.

I do not have indentLine installed. I do have vim-polyglot installed, which, as I understand it, includes vim-json.

However, when I open a .json file, I can see quotes, still.

I tried out indentLine, but the quotes did not come back when the cursor was on their line, so I uninstalled it. Playing with conceallevel didn't help me.

My rc (updated according to @statox's suggestion):

if empty(glob('~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim'))
      silent !curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs
          \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim
        autocmd VimEnter * PlugInstall --sync | source $MYVIMRC
    endif

" :h filetype said just this was OK
filetype on
syntax enable

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

" Declare the list of plugins.
Plug 'dense-analysis/ale'
Plug 'sheerun/vim-polyglot'
Plug 'reedes/vim-colors-pencil'
call plug#end()

syntax on

colorscheme pencil
set background=dark

My vim --version reports the following:

VIM - Vi IMproved 8.2 (2019 Dec 12, compiled May 23 2020 22:02:57)
Included patches: 1-814
Compiled by Arch Linux

I bet it's something really dumb, but I miss the clean look of quoteless JSON.

Answer 1

The actual issue is due to you simply having:

filetype on

While what you usually want is:

filetype plugin indent on

The former simply enables filetype detection, while the latter enables filetype plug-ins and indent plug-ins.

The filetype plug-in for json (ftplugin/json.vim) is the one which defaults g:vim_json_syntax_conceal to 1. You should have that plug-in run early in Vim initialization to have conceal set correctly.

Answer 2

Turns out if I add this to the end of my rc, it works:

let g:vim_json_syntax_conceal = 1

Thank you @fibranden!