Simple document highlighting in Vim

Question

I am looking for a filetype= argument that will format or color document constructs such as lists, headers and sub headrs.

Particularly I want the filetype plugin (or syntax plugin) to interpret these formats:

Header
======

Sub
---

Sub2
----


[*] moo
[*] foo
[*] bar

Answer 1

Markdown is sufficient enough or applying basic styles and formatting to plain-text documents.

Answer 2

What you probably want is to use syntax highlighting.

Check out the vbnet.vim plugin to see a more complex example of a syntax file than is shown in the tutorial. You'll need to create your own syntax file to handle the custom formats you show in your question. You would do this by setting up various keyword, match, cluster, and region groups to get what you want. Examples of how to set up each of these groups can be found in the vbnet.vim plugin.

Once you've written your own custom syntax file, then assign those syntax groups a name as seen in the last line of vbnet.vim:

let b:current_syntax = "vbnet"

And in your .vimrc use an autocmd to turn on that specific syntax highlighting for a specific file extention:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.vb set ft=vbnet

Adjust the highlighting of various groups in your colorscheme file.