Is it possible to not trigger my normal search highlighting when using search as a movement?

Question

When I do a search in vim, I like to have my results highlighted and super-visible, so I give them a bright yellow background and a black foreground in my .vimrc.

" When highlighting search terms, make sure text is contrasting colors
:highlight Search guibg=yellow guifg=black

(This is for GUI versions of vim, like MacVim or Gvim; for command-line, you'd use ctermbg and ctermfg.)

But I sometimes use search as a movement, as in c/\foo - "change from the cursor to the next occurrence of foo."

In that case, I don't want all the occurrences of foo to be highlighted.

Can I turn off highlighting in cases where search is used as a movement for a command?

Answer 1

To permanently disable highlighting of searches:

:set nohlsearch
(or)
:set nohls

But probably you want to keep highlight on. On the other hand, if want to temporary get rid of the highlight, type:

:nohlsearch
(or)
:noh

It will stop highlighting the current search, until you search again.

Even though it's not the perfect answer for you, this is a nice workaround, and this is what I use.