Highlighting matching parens

The functionality mentioned here is astandard-plugin.This plugin is only available if'compatible' is not set.

You can avoid loading this plugin by setting the "loaded_matchparen" variable:

:let loaded_matchparen = 1

The plugin installs CursorMoved, CursorMovedI and WinEnter autocommands toredefine the match highlighting.

:NoMatchParen:DoMatchParenTo disable the plugin after it was loaded use this command:

:NoMatchParen

And to enable it again:

:DoMatchParen

The highlighting used is MatchParen. You can specify different colors withthe ":highlight" command. Example:

:hi MatchParen ctermbg=blue guibg=lightblue

By default the plugin will highlight both the paren under the cursor and thematching one using thehl-MatchParen highlighting group. This may result inthe cursor briefly disappearing from the screen as the MatchParen colors takeover the cursor highlight. To prevent this from happening and have the pluginonly highlight the matching paren and not the one under the cursor(effectively leaving the cursor style unchanged), you can set the"matchparen_disable_cursor_hl" variable:

:let matchparen_disable_cursor_hl = 1

The characters to be matched come from the'matchpairs' option. You canchange the value to highlight different matches. Note that not everything ispossible. For example, you can't highlight single or double quotes, becausethe start and end are equal.

The syntax highlighting attributes are used. When the cursor currently is notin a string or comment syntax item, then matches inside string and commentsyntax items are ignored. Any syntax items with "string" or "comment"somewhere in their name are considered string or comment items.

The search is limited to avoid a delay when moving the cursor. The limitsare:

If you would like the% command to work better, thematchit plugin can beused. This plugin also helps to skip matches in comments. This is unrelatedto the matchparen highlighting, they use a different mechanism.