Recently, my vi editor (vim) began highlighting spaces and what it thought were keywords in files. This highlighting made the documents difficult to read and wasn’t needed. I’m fairly sure that I erroneously entered some command and caused this behavior. After a little googling, I found a couple of commands to turn this behavior off, specifically, ‘:set hls!’ and ‘:syntax off’. Those commands worked great until I exited vi and then opened another file. After a little searching, I found the following in /etc/vimrc:
” Switch syntax highlighting on, when the terminal has colors
” Also switch on highlighting the last used search pattern.
if &t_Co > 2 || has(“gui_running”)
syntax on
set hlsearch
endif
Change this section to read (change on to off and remove hlsearch):
” Switch syntax highlighting on, when the terminal has colors
” Also switch on highlighting the last used search pattern.
if &t_Co > 2 || has(“gui_running”)
syntax off
endif
Now the highlighting has disappeared. Hope this helps some others who only use vi out of necessity.
