Highlighting python code blocks in vim

Question

I wanted to highlight different indentation levels in vim, so I could identify large blocks of code more easily. I have some reasonable large nested for/while/with/try blocks and it gets hard to identify the block a am into, i.e. how many 'tabs' I have before the cursor.

Is there a way to highlight tabs?

This is what I have in mind:

try:
*   while True:
*   *   for foo in bar:
*   *   *   do()
*   if something:
*   *   done()
except bla:
*   exit()

Where * would be a special background color.

I would also settle for any other way to identify the indentation levels.

Mandatory snarky comment: perhaps you could try fixing your code instead of your editor. ;-) +1 though for an interesting question. I'm curious to see what this would actually look like. — Michael Kristofik
– Michael Kristofik, Commented Feb 6, 2012 at 17:06

Walter · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-06 17:22:52Z

8

The Indent Guides vim plug-in does exactly this kind of highlighting. I use it together with the listchars option (as Ackar pointed out).

answered Feb 6, 2012 at 17:22

Walter

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2 Comments

Michael Kristofik Over a year ago

Oh wow, that plugin is pretty cool. It's way less obtrusive than I expected.

puk Over a year ago

@Kristo I too use it and like it, unfortunately, it fails for blank likes since vim is incapable of highlighting blanks

Sylvain Cleymans · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-06 17:35:05Z

3

You can use the listchars options to display specifics characters (see :help listchars).

For example if you want to show tabs you could use :

:set listchars=tab:*\     " Be careful : there is a space after the backslash
:set list

You can also change the highlighting colors using the highlight property for the SpecialKey group.

If you use vim in a terminal :

:highlight SpecialKey ctermfg=Cyan

See :help highlight for more informations.

You can also check :runtime syntax/colortest.vim to see all the available colors.

edited Feb 6, 2012 at 17:35

answered Feb 6, 2012 at 17:09

Sylvain Cleymans

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2 Comments

Niklas B. Over a year ago

Maybe you should also mention how one can set the highlighting color for listchars.

Rafael Barbosa Over a year ago

Although this does exactly what I asked for, it does not work for me. I used the 'expandtab' option, so there are no 'tab' chars in my scripts, only spaces. I did not know about list[chars], great tip.

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