How to highlight/match (but not search!) the word under cursor

Question

I am searching some pattern, navigate between search results, and at the same time I want some other pattern to be highlighted. For example, I jump between invocations of some function in my project, usually there is a variable named "session" around and I want this word to be highlighted.

What I do is:

:match StatusLineTerm /session/

where StatusLineTerm is just a name of existing highlight group having the color I like.

The question is: how to create some key combination that would call this match command using the word under cursor as a match pattern? Something like nnoremap <F5> :match StatusLineTerm /.expand(<cword>)/, but actually working?

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 26 '18 at 09:07

10

For a quick solution, try this:

:nnoremap <F5> :match StatusLineTerm /<C-R><C-W>/<CR>

This uses Ctrl-RCtrl-W to insert the word under the cursor into the command line. See :help c_CTRL-R_CTRL-W.

answered Sep 26 '18 at 09:07

Rich

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thakis · Answer 2 · 2021-01-20T18:31:24.387

7

Here's how you do this automatically after keeping your cursor still for a short time:

:au CursorHold * :exec 'match Search /\V\<' . expand('<cword>') . '\>/'

By default, this will highlight the word under the cursor after 4s of inactivity. Use :set updatetime=100 to make it happen after 0.1s instead.

If you want to do this in a script instead of as a one-off, put it in an autogroup so that you don't add a new CursorHold autocommand every time the script runs:

augroup highlight_current_word
  au!
  au CursorHold * :exec 'match Search /\V\<' . expand('<cword>') . '\>/'
augroup END

edited Jan 20 '21 at 18:31

answered Jun 01 '20 at 22:46

thakis

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Welcome to [vi.se]! You might want to show this with an autogroup, since that is best practice. – D. Ben Knoble Jun 01 '20 at 23:27
I definitely would not want to do it, but thanks a lot, it's cool trick to know about! – lesnik Jun 02 '20 at 06:52
@D.BenKnoble Good idea, done. – thakis Jun 02 '20 at 23:13

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 26 '18 at 08:39

6

I use a plugin for that: interesting words. It's not big, since it's only feature is to highligh words with defined or random colors, advantage is that you can have more than one color/highligh under single key. You can easly clear all the highlights done with that plugin if needed as well.

answered Sep 26 '18 at 08:39

grodzik

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Not exactly what I want (f.e. I no NOT want to navigate between the interesting words), but it's something to investigate or may be use. – lesnik Sep 26 '18 at 09:02

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 26 '18 at 11:27

5

I use the mark.vim-plugin for this. It can handle many interesting words at the same time and allows to jump between highlighted words.

answered Sep 26 '18 at 11:27

Naumann

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score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 20 '18 at 04:57

You indicate that you were trying to get the mapping to work with <cword>. Though the answer you accepted is just fine I'm surprised no one answered with a corrected use of that.

Normally the string on the RHS of a mapping is executed literally as an Ex command. No pre- expansion/evaluation/processing of the string occurs. So :match in

:nnoremap <F5> :match StatusLineTerm /.expand(<cword>)./

(along the lines of your attempt) will try to literally match the string '.expand(<cword>).'

If we want the string or some portion of it to be expanded/evaluated we have to do it ourselves by passing it to the :exec command as an expression:

:exec 'match StatusLineTerm /' . expand('<cword>') . '/'

Note that we surround with quotes any parts that we want to use literally and append them with .. The rest is evaluated. (Also note that <cword> is a special string and needs to be quoted before being passed to expand().)

So, the mapping you were originally going for is:

:nnoremap <F5> :exec 'match StatusLineTerm /' . expand('<cword>') . '/'<CR>

How to highlight/match (but not search!) the word under cursor

5 Answers5