Turn off highlights when pattern is entered

Question

I find :set hlsearch useful while I am entering the pattern; but I want the effect of :noh as soon as I press enter. Is that possible?

Answer 1

From a excellent book -- "Practical Vim":

Typing :noh<CR> to mute search highlighting is laborious. You can speed things up by creating a mapping such as this:

nnoremap <silent> <C-l> :<C-u>nohlsearch<CR><C-l> 

Normally, clears and redraws the screen (see :h CTRL-L). This mapping builds on top of the usual behavior by muting search highlighting.

You can add this line to you vimrc file. If you hit Ctrl+l, Vim will mute search highlighting and redraw the screen at the same time.

Answer 2

I think you can achieve what you want through the mapping

cnoremap <silent> <cr> <cr>:nohl<cr>

The above mapping should turn of highlighted searches after you have pressed enter to accept the search pattern.

Note, though, that the highlighting is turned back on with for instance n and N, i.e. when repeating the search. You can turn this off with maps, e.g.

nnoremap n n:nohl<cr>
nnoremap N N:nohl<cr>

Note: I found that the above cnoremap does not work as expected if you use the incsearch plugin, and I could not find why.

Answer 3

I have in my .vimrc

:nmap <leader>q :nohlsearch<CR>

which maps my leader (\ by default, but I remapped to ,) then q to remove the search highlighting. Not exactly what you're looking for, but it might be worthwhile.

That, and several other nice bits came from http://dougblack.io/words/a-good-vimrc.html#search, though he uses space to disable the highlight.