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Asked: 2026-06-04T12:25:14+00:00

I’m using :set showmatch to highlight the matching bracket or brace when the cursor

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I’m using :set showmatch to highlight the matching bracket or brace when the cursor is over one.

I’d like to change the highlight-color so that it’s radically different from the cursor color, because I’ve got the situation shown in the screenshots.

When the cursor is over the second brace:

Cursor over the second brace

And when the cursor is to the immediate-right of the brace:

Cursor to the right

This uses my terminal color scheme, which is taken from Solarized. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a pain to see which highlight is the brace matching and which is the cursor, when the braces are close together.

Is there a Vim setting I can use to change the color of that to, say, the bold magenta ANSI? I’m not particularly interested in remapping my ANSI colors within the terminal or shell – I’d like a Vim-specific option, if it exists.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can change the colors to, e.g., blue over green:

    hi MatchParen cterm=none ctermbg=green ctermfg=blue

    Just put it in your .vimrc file.

    Basically, cterm determines the style, which can be none, underline or bold, while ctermbg and ctermfg are, as their names suggest, background and foreground colors, so change them as you see fit.

    For your case, you may want

    hi MatchParen cterm=bold ctermbg=none ctermfg=magenta
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