When making a colorscheme, what is the label for the ~ area of the screen below EOF?

Question

I have found some color schemes that I like, but some of them have the feature that the lines below the content of the file on the display - the ~ area - have a different background color as shown.. I want it to be the same background color as normal text. When editing the color scheme, what keyword am I looking for to fix this?

I'm using MacVim but I assume this is a universal question.

Answer 1

Since Vim 8 there is the EndOfBuffer highlight group for this; from :help hl-EndOfBuffer:

EndOfBuffer filler lines (~) after the last line in the buffer.
        By default, this is highlighted like hl-NonText.

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For earlier Vim versions it's NonText. From :help hl-NonText:

NonText         '~' and '@' at the end of the window, characters from
                'showbreak' and other characters that do not really exist in
                the text (e.g., ">" displayed when a double-wide character
                doesn't fit at the end of the line).

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I didn't know this either. How I found this:

• I typed :help 'highlight'
• I noticed there's a list with highlight "occasions" here with a brief description.
• Type /\~ to search for the ~ character

And on :help colorscheme I read:

:hi[ghlight] clear {group-name}
:hi[ghlight] {group-name} NONE
                        Disable the highlighting for one highlight group.  It
                        is _not_ set back to the default colors.

Using :highlight clear NonText seems to work for me.

Answer 2

In terms of highlight groups, I believe it is called NonText. From :he highlight-groups:

                                                        hl-NonText
NonText         '~' and '@' at the end of the window, characters from
                'showbreak' and other characters that do not really exist in
                the text (e.g., ">" displayed when a double-wide character
                doesn't fit at the end of the line).

You can probably set it to the same colour as the remaining area using:

:hi NonText ctermfg=NONE