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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T17:34:13+00:00

Recently I create a mapping to toggle highlight search. That’s simple but quite useful,

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Recently I create a mapping to toggle highlight search. That’s simple but quite useful, something like nmap ,m :set hlsearch!. The only problem I’ve been facing is that sometimes I just get lost after pressing ,m.

“Did it work?”, “Is it now on or off?”… Common question from the panic of not receiving feedback 🙂

So I thought that echoing a “turned on” or “off” would make me calmer. The big question here now arrived: is it possible to include a little script inside the mapping? I know I could create a function, but that’s not my intention for this simple script:

if (&hlsearch)
    echo "Search Highlight On"
else
    echo "Search Highlight Off"
endif

I guess that I need to “escape” the newlines like in a preprocessor directive, maybe:

nmap ,m :set hlsearch!              \
    if (&hlsearch)                  \
        echo "Search Highlight On"  \
    else                            \
        echo "Search Highlight Off" \
    endif

But probably that’s not the proper way, doesn’t work and I don’t even know if it is possible.

Another thing I notice is that typing things like :if (1) echo "works" doesn’t work either, even though both if and echo are “colon” commands. It gives an error with echo. So do I need to separate each command in some way? Preceding echo with another colon didn’t solve the problem.

Thanks for any help!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can do it, but I’d recommend against it. A mapping links one or two key presses (,m) in your case to a sequence of key presses. Therefore, to do what you want to do, you just have to type in the commands as you would if you were doing it interactively:

    nmap <silent> ,m :set hlsearch!<CR>:if (&hlsearch)<CR>echo "Search Highlight On"<CR>else<CR>echo "Search Highlight Off"<CR>endif<CR>

    Each <CR> is the equivalent of pressing ENTER. The <silent> stops it from echoing the whole contents of the mapping to the screen, so you only see “Search Highlight On/Off”.

    The other way you can join commands (in some cases) is with | so for example:

    :if (1) | echo "works" | endif

    See :help :bar for more information on this.

    Do it with a function! It’ll make things much more maintainable in the long run.

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