Question

In emacs, when you do a search, there will be one highlight color for all occurences in the buffer, and another color for the occurence that your cursor happens to be on. I was wondering if anyone knew about similar behavior in vim, a vim plugin, or even some ideas on how to accomplish it myself in vimscript.

(note, I already know about hl-IncSearch, which is close, but not what I am looking for)

Answer 1

As far as I know there isn’t a built-in way to do what you want.

If I were to try to implement it myself… Well one way you could do it is by overriding *, n and p and combining it with something like this function:

noremap n n:call HighlightNearCursor()<CR>
noremap p p:call HighlightNearCursor()<CR>
noremap * *:call HighlightNearCursor()<CR>

function HighlightNearCursor()
  if !exists("s:highlightcursor")
    match Todo /\k*\%#\k*/
    let s:highlightcursor=1
  else
    match None
    unlet s:highlightcursor
  endif
endfunction

I haven’t tested it out, so this isn’t a complete solution, but I think it is at least a viable approach.

EDIT : You will probably have to set some custom highlight colours. This vimwiki page gives some information about that, although I remember seeing a terser example somewhere.

EDIT AGAIN: Maybe a cleaner solution is to use Mark.vim in conjunction with the first technique. Then it would all boil down to something like:

noremap n \nn\m
noremap p \np\m
noremap * \n*\m