Deprecation

You should now just use the built-in CurSearch highlight group in vim (added in patch 8.2.4724) and neovim (added in version 0.9.0), which does the same thing as this plugin.

Vim: Highlight Match Under Cursor

A simple vim and neovim plugin that does what the title says: highlights the match currently under the cursor with a unique colour to differentiate it from all the other search-highlighted matches. This is convenient for easily identifying the current match when quickly jumping amongst many. In the GIF below, the current match is highlighted in the default red colour.

The plugin plays nicely with all search commands (/, ?, n, N, *, #) and the ignorecase and smartcase options.

Installation

Can be installed with the vim plugin manager of your choice. For example, if you use plug, add

Plug 'https://github.com/adamheins/vim-highlight-match-under-cursor'

to your .vimrc (vim) or init.vim (neovim).

Configuration

You can change the highlight style for the match under the cursor by setting the variable

g:HighlightMatchUnderCursor_highlight_args

in your .vimrc or init.vim, which takes standard highlight arguments as a string (see :h highlight-args). The default value is 'ctermbg=88 cterm=NONE'. Alternatively you can set the variable

g:HighlightMatchUnderCursor_highlight_link_group

to link the CurrentSearchWord group to a configured highlight group. I personally like to set this to be the same as :hi IncSearch.

The highlighting is updated whenever the cursor is moved, and only appears when search highlighting is active (i.e., when v:hlsearch is true). If you want to clear the highlight without moving the cursor, you can use

:call HighlightMatchUnderCursor#matchdelete()

License

MIT—see the LICENSE file.