How to highlight cursor line number without cursor line?

Question

I want the cursor line number to have a different color than the rest of numbers with cursorline disabled.

Sadly CursorLineNR is only active if set cursorline. I could do set cursorline followed by hi clear CursorLine with hi CursorLineNR, however I want cursorline to be visible when set and not visible when not set, and still have the cursor line number have a different color.

With set cursorline + hi CursorLineNr guifg=#af00af:

but when doing set nocursorline it disappears:

I want the 197 number to always be guifg=#af00af, even after set nocursorline. Is this anyhow possible?

Ie. compare:

vim -u NONE -c 'hi CursorLineNr guibg=#ff0000 ctermbg=red' -c 'set number relativenumber' -c 'exe "normal i\<cr>- should be red\<cr>\<up>\<esc>"' -c 'set nocursorline'

vs the same with cursorline in the last argument (or do :set cursorline). The same above command when run with neovim makes the number line in red in both cases.

Answer 1

You need these three lines:

hi CursorLineNr guifg=#af00af
set cursorline
set cursorlineopt=number

The last line removes the highlighting of the cursor line even if cursorline is set and only highlights the cursor line number.