Highlight.vim

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Highlight.vim plugin is a pattern-based text background highlighter, that highlights span of texts (words, sentences, paragraphs), also specified via regular expressions, using a background color (random picked or specified by user).

A set of user commands (in command mode) are supplied to select text in a bunch of different ways, from direct set, visual selection, etc.

What's the point?

Sometime you need to highlight words, sentences or any character spans in your text files, with a nice background color, with the goal of point out keywords, labels, tags, important sections, etc.

I personally have this need:

• When analyzing a text, with the aim to select linguistics entities (verbs, nouns, special keywords), with the help of a nice visual overview of different kind of contents

• When annotating intents sentences and named entities in "conversational AI" / chatbot tools, like RASA et al

• When programming in a standard programming language (NodeJs, Python) just to put in evidence function names, variables, etc.

What's the original goal?

This project is related to the original (open) points raised from my vi stackexchange questions:

• Vim editor entities tagging/annotation tool
• How to replace selected text T with some function(T), using a keyboard shortcut?

The final goal is to create a plugin to annotate NLP attributes (intents, entities, etc.) within the vim editor.

The plugin is by example complementary to companion nera.vim, that I shared to annotate entities in RASA named entities syntax format.

Background colors?

What I mean with highlight is to colorize the background of some text.

This plugin currently uses a subset of cterm/xterm 256 colors, suitable for terminal mode.

highlight color31  ctermbg=31  ctermfg=0

I decide to use black (ctermfg=0) as fixed foreground color. That's opinabile. The reason why of the subset is because some (too dark) colors do not make a suitable contrast with the black foreground color.

A pattern-based colorizer?

Behind the scenes the plugin uses matchadd vimscript function (help matchadd).

This means that if you highlight a text span instance (say the keyword temperature_body), in facts all occurrences of the same text are highlighted with the same color, in the current buffer. This is smart and maybe what you are looking for in many cases.

Install

Using vim-plug, in your .vimrc file:

Plug 'solyarisoftware/Highlight.vim'

Usage

In vim command mode (:) these commands are available:

Explicit text highlight:

command	description
:HighlightText text [color]	highlights a text/regexp with a random or specified color

Visual/Motion highlight:

command	description
:HighlightVisual [color]	highlights a visual selection with a random or specified color
:HighlightLine [color]	highlights the current line with a random or specified color
:HighlightYanked [color]	highlights the yanked text with a random or specified color
:HighlightCursor [color]	highlights the word under the cursor with a random or specified color
:HighlightSearch [color]	highlights the searched text with a random or specified color

Utilities:

command	description
:HighlightColors	visualizes all available colors
:HighlightUndo	undo lasts highlight command
:HighlightLabelColor label color	Assign a label (alias) to a color name
:HighlightLoadScript script_file	execute all Highlight commands in specified script file

:HighlightText text [color]

Highlight a word or sentence, or any regexp pattern, picking a random background color:

:HighlightText text

The text is highlighted with a random chose background color.

💡Tip: If you don't like the random background color, in command line just redo the Highlight command!

💡Tip: the text pattern could be also a vimscript regexp pattern, by example: HighlightText \ .HighlightText\ matches strings 1HighlightText or 2HighlightText, etc.

Highlight a word or sentence (the text), or a regexp pattern, with a specified background color

:HighlightText text color

The text is highlighted with the specified color (color name or corresponding color id).

💡Tip: if the text contains spaces, you need to escape them ( must be written \ ), by example some\ text\ to\ be\ colorized

Examples:

command	description
:HighlightText a text span made by many words	highlights a specific span of words
:HighlightText some_text_without_blanks color70	highlight a word, using a specific color name
:HighlightText some_text_without_blanks 70	highlight a word, using a specific color number
:HighlightText text\ containing\ blanks color69	highlight a phrase (with spaces), using a specific color
:HighlightText text\ containing\ blanks 69	highlight a phrase (with spaces), using a specific color
:HighlightText /\vmin|max	highlights a text defined by a regular expression
:HighlightText (\zsgender\ze) 217	highlights a text defined by a regular expression
:HighlightText \[\zs[^\[\]]\{-}\ze\](gender) 217	highlights a text defined by a regular expression
:HighlightText Giorgio .	highlights text Giorgio, using last used color (217)

:HighlightVisual [color]

Highlight a visual selection

Picking a random background color:

:HighlightVisual 

Selecting a specific background color:

:HighlightVisual color

💡Tip: you can just pass the color as a number, HighlightVisual 123

Examples:

command	description
:HighlightVisual	highlights visual selection, with a random color
:HighlightVisual 71	highlights visual selection, with a specific color number
:HighlightVisual color71	highlights visual selection, with a specific color name
:HighlightVisual .	highlights visual selection, using last used color (71)

:HighlightColors

Show the list of available colors, highlighting each color name:

:HighlightColors

A color name is one of the items: color17, color18, ..., color254, color255

💡Tip: in all commands below you can just pass the color also as a number, by example: color18 could be referred also as 18

:HighlightLabelColor label color

💡Tip: in all commands below you can just pass the color also as a number, Assign a label (alias) name to a color name. In that way you could afterward use the custom label instead of a color name or number. That's useful when you want to assign logical classes (labels) to the same color, for a visual "unification", by example:

:HighlightLabelColor verb color55
:HighlightText go verb
:HighlightText went verb
:HighlightText come verb
:HighlightText came verb

:HighlightLoadScript script_file

Execute all Highlight commands in specified script file. By example you want to highlight a list of keywords at once.

1. you create a script file my_highlight_script.vim containing all your Highlight commands as:

   "
   " my_highlight_script.vim
   "
   HighlightText my_keyword color43
   HighlightText anoter_keyword  43
   HighlightText a_third_keyword 43
   HighlightText a\ sentence 109
   HighlightText another\ full\ sentence color78
   HighlightText a_text_using_last_used_color .
   HighlightText \[\zs[^\[\]]\{-}\ze\](address) 1004
   HighlightText (\zsaddress\ze) . 
   

2. Afterward you run the script from command mode:

   :HighlightLoadScript my_highlight_script.vim
   

Keyboard shortcuts

💡Tip: You can use vim key map to assign an Highlight.vim command to a key.

By example, to assign the command :HighlightText Screenshots to the key F2:

map <F2> :HighlightText Screenshots<CR>

Or you want to assign the command :HighlightYanked 134 to the key F3:

map <F3> :HighlightYanked 134<CR>

Or suppose you want to highlight a text with a casual color

:HighlightText Screenshots<CR>

But you are unhappy with the background color, so you can repeat the last command with:

:map <F3> @:

:HighlightText Screenshots<CR>

For now on, F3 repeat last command, so highlighting with a new random color!

Usage Examples/Screenshots

Many usage examples here

Similar/Related projects

• https://github.com/lfv89/vim-interestingwords
• https://github.com/joanrivera/vim-highlight
• https://www.github.com/solyarisoftware/nera.vim

Status / How to contribute

This project is work-in-progress.

I'm not a vimscript expert, so any contribute is welcome.

If you like the project, please ⭐️star this repository to show your support! 🙏

For any proposal and issue, please submit here on github issues for bugs, suggestions, etc. You can also contact me via email ([email protected]).

Thanks

• https://vi.stackexchange.com/users/9333/maxim-kim

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