Home / server / Questions / 907597
In Process
JohnA
Asked: 2018-04-14 13:05:02 +0800 CST

Disable VIM Syntax Highlighting

  • 772

I am a system administrator and not a programmer. I frequently su to different system users for task so a .vimrc file for each system user is cumbersome. I need to be able to read the comments in config files and VIM syntax highlighting gets in the way for me.

How does one globally turn off syntax highlighting in VIM on Ubuntu systems?

linux

3 Answers

  1. The downside of using a .vimrc however is, as long as you aren't using a central home directory that is mounted via NFS on all your hosts, you have to do this on every host you work on.

    There is another option: vim also takes settings from environment variables.

    This becomes interesting along with another tidbit that is not so widely known: SSH clients can set environment variables on the host you connect to.

    On Unix/Linux you can configure this in ~/.ssh/environment:

    VIMINIT=syntax off

    If you are using PuTTy on Windows there is also a way to set environment variables:

    enter image description here

    (Don't forget to save this to your default settings.)

    With this setting the SSH client will set the environment variable on the host when you connect (if the host permits it), vim will read the variable on startup and use it as a configuration.

    Sadly this will not work out of the box since SSH daemons are usally configured to accept only very few environment variables from the client. A default configuration from Ubuntu looks like this:

    AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

    It only allows the variable LANG and all variables that start with LC_, allowing you to set the language of the output regardless on what language is configured as default on the server. To allow the vim configuration variables you have to extend this:

    AcceptEnv LANG LC_* VIMINT

    Of course, this will have to be done again once on every server you work on, but if you are using a configuration management environment like ansible, puppet or such this can be deployed easily and everybody working on the servers can benefit from it.

    You see, there are various ways to do this, what's the best way to do it depends on your environment.

    • 4

  2. I think you probably don’t need to disable syntax highlighting, the issue is mainly that the default theme colors make comments too hard to read...

    I would try to solve the UI issue as in general syntax highlighting will improve your productivity IMHO.

    One of the more annoying things with terminal applications (xterm has the same issue) is that by default dark-blue is too dark to be visible on a black background. Not only is this frustrating, it makes the experience for new users so bad that they prefer to disable colours (or hate the ls colour output or syntax highlighting in vim).

    So if you are like me, go to PuTTY Category: Window > Colours and select ANSI Blue in the Select a colour to adjust to Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255.
    I do the same for ANSI Blue Bold to Red:140 Green:140 Blue:255.

    http://dag.wiee.rs/blog/content/improving-putty-settings-on-windows

    The advantage of that is you don’t need to adjust anything on the servers you access. A simple change on your workstation alone and maximum return.

    Other terminal emulators will usually also allow you to adjust the color scheme.

    • 1

  3. Note: this is applicable for Ubuntu and probably Debian

    Edit /etc/vim/vimrc

    find this line

    if has("syntax")
  syntax on
endif

    change to

    if has("syntax")
  syntax off
endif

    This will turn off syntax highlighting globally. This can be undone on a per user basis by adding a .vimrc file in user homedirs with the command syntax on

    Hope this is helpful.

    • 0