Custom vim highlighting

Question

I am editing some xml right now and I have been leaving myself some comments of things to come back to. Like this

<!-- Question: bla bla -->

I am editing with vim right now and I would like vim to highlight Question right now so that I can easily look through my code and find all the places I need to look at. I know I need to add something in my vimrc but I think that I might be searching for the wrong thing.

Update

I tried putting this in my .vimrc but it had no effect:

syn keyword JakeAnnotation      Question

hi JakeAnnotation gui=bold term=bold cterm=bold

Update 2

Actually I can see that what I did before had some effect because when I do this:

:hi

It shows me all of the things that it is highlighting and one of the entries is:

JakeAnnotation xxx term=bold cterm=bold ctermbg=6

(and the xxx is formatted correctly)

This leads me to beleave that I am just not defining Question properly. Does Question need to be on a line by itself?

Update 3

Ok so to user 22303's post I have this working:

highlight MyQuestion cterm=bold term=bold ctermbg=blue ctermfg=black
match MyQuestion /Question/

However I suspect that you are only allowed to have one match per file. Because when I do this:

highlight MyQuestion cterm=bold term=bold ctermbg=blue ctermfg=black
match MyQuestion /Question/
highlight MyRelook cterm=bold term=bold ctermbg=blue ctermfg=black
match MyRelook /Another look/

The first one stops working. (But the second one works).

Answer 1

I think we've been feeding you some answers that aren't quite right. Here's something to try that I tested on my machine.

First, create your own new highlight group:

:highlight MyQuestions guifg=red guibg=green

Now, specify that the highlight group will exist whenever a pattern is matched:

:syntax match MyQuestions /Question/

That should start showing highlight of the text 'Question' on each line that has that text. To expand to show whole line you would change search text to have wildcards matching entire line, something like this:

:syntax match MyQuestions /.*Question.*/

Answer 2

The file you are looking for is a 'syntax' file. Try looking in /usr/local/share/vim/syntax/ or /usr/share/vim/syntax/. The file you want is xml.vim.

The simplest thing to do is find the line that has

syn keyword xmlTodo         contained TODO FIXME XXX

and change it to:

syn keyword xmlTodo         contained TODO FIXME XXX Question

This will add the 'Todo' highlight to any comment containing the text Question.

If you are going to use this for (ever), it would be best to copy the xml.vim into your local ~/.vim/syntax so that changes to vim won't overwrite your custom syntax file.

Update

If you want a similar (sortof) capability in any file, I would use the 'goto' command. I'll admit that this is like hlsearch, which you said annoys you.

While editing, when the cursor is on a word, type gd to search from the current point in the file or gD to search from the beginning. Every word in your file that matches the current word is highlighted. You can type n to jump to the next instance of that word.

I tend to do this, because you get highlight and navigation with minimal typing. You turn off the highlight in the usual way: :noh[lsearch]

Answer 3

You could simply do

:set hlsearch

And then search for Question

Answer 4

You have several options.
- one, as Dominik mentioned ... you can search for those one by one (not that practical)
- two, you can do ":g/<-- Question" to get a "list" of them all (a little better, gives an overall picture)
- three, you can set up a highlighting group if you're only using those kind of comments in xml files (I've no idea how xml looks like, so I don't know if there are some other kind of comments in them as well). This would be good if you setted it up in vimrc, since when you refresh vim with a newer version, your xlm.vim file will be gone.

Answer 5

You don't necessarily need to put the command in your vimrc. You can always just enter it at command line and then clear it when you don't want the highlighting anymore. Commands would be something like this:

:hi Question guifg=red guibg=blue gui=bold

In gvim (i.e., vim with a gui) that will set the foreground(guifg), background, and general character settings.

if you want to get rid of that higlighting do this:

:hi Question clear

Using vim inside a terminal you can modify to use this command:

:hi Question ctermfg=red ctermbg=blue term=bold

You can of course put any of those in your vimrc, and you can also combine the gui and term flags into single hi command.

---

[below added after I read another poster's answer]

Sorry, I was assuming that the syntax of your question lines already matched your syntax file's settings for Vim's built-in 'Question' highlight tag. Just look at the other answer that mentions the xml syntax file for vim and then you can issue commands above using ToDo highlight group instead of Question.

Answer 6

I'm late to the party but I use TODO and FIXME for exactly this situation.

Most, if not all, colorschemes will highlight the TODO in the following example with some combination of background color, underline and italics :

<tree>
  <!--TODO : do I have to add a trunk tag ?-->
  <branch>
    <leaf>caterpillar</leaf>
    <leaf>caterpillar</leaf>
  </branch>
</tree>

It doesn't really fit semantically but it works very well from a purely functional point of view.