Gregory Margo wrote:
On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 02:44:17PM -0400, Chisum Lindauer wrote:
Hello all I've just worked on trying to get this to work a few hours
with no luck, so I thought I'd consult the community.
In short, my syntax highlighting doesn't work. Not in vim or vim
-g/gvim. I've tried the easy things like :snytax enable or :syntax on
and manually loading a colorscheme but to no effect.
I recently did an apt-get upgrade which broke my X install.
Once I had fixed that and returned to the world of GUI's I found my
syntax highlighting didn't work. The color test shows all the colors
properly however. (Select it from the syntax menu in gvim).
At first I thought it might be because of my terminal, but changing that
using tset and/or setting my TERM environment variable to xterm-color
helped not in the least. It's not just a color problem anyhow, as bold
and italics don't work on syntax either. It's not a colorscheme bug
either, as I've tried using several colorschemes and get the same
results (though it will change the bgcolor an fgcolor in gvim).
I tried removing and reinstalling gvim as well, but the problem
persists. Needless to say, now that I'm used to syntax highlighting
being without it feels like losing an arm.
The only error message I've ever seen regarding the syntax is when I
opened up gvim and select on/off for This file under the syntax menu, it
tells me that my colorscheme can not be found when parsing
syntax/synload.vim. This error doesn't happen except when I first load
vim, and only if I don't change the colorscheme before hand. This might
be a clue for someone, but probably not.
Also if I log into our server ssh -X and use gvim over the network,
syntax highlighting does work, of course, that doesn't say a damn thing
either. It just makes me think that it's probably a configuration file
of some sort...
I hope someone has an idea, I sure as hell don't.
Thanks,
Chisum Lindauer
If you have both vim-6 and vim-7 installed, there may be a conflict,
especially if you try to share a ~/.vim directory. I'm running under
Debian Stable, and have the default vim-6.3.82 installed, and have a
locally compiled vim-7.0.15 installed also (with binary name 'vim7').
Syntax highlighting works find under either. However,
I've kept them seperated with different .vimrc files, and different
'runtimepath' variables.
Try this: in an xterm (version 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1) run
"/path/to/your/vim7 -u NONE".
Now type ":help" - you should see black-n-white help text.
Now type ":syntax on" - you should see the help with syntax highlighting.
If does not work, it could be the color settings of the xterm itself.
Since you mentioned breaking your X setup, could it be that you're
running a bleeding edge Debian Unstable (etch) system?
Just letting everyone know that I got it working finally. I purged the
apt-get vim packages, deleted my own .vimrc and .gvimrc files and
installed from source (though it said I had no terminal library so I
installed ncurses from source as well).
I think it was a combination of issues, in part it was because I had
messed with the config files before and I think something was wrong with
my .vimrc and .gvimrc files, in addition I don't think it had the
terminal support it needed (as even under different users with default
.vimrc and .gvimrc files the problem persisted before). Thank you all
for your help :) vim -u NONE is quite handy, and I learned more about
vim and debian to boot.
Thank You,
Chisum Lindauer
