beer planet

Today I was asked a question about defining custom extensions for vim syntax highlighting such that, for example, vim would know that example.lmx is actually of type xml and apply xml syntax highlighting to it. I know vim already automatically does it not just based on extension but by looking for certain strings inside the text, like

After digging around I found the solution. Add the following to ~/.vimrc (the vim configuration file):

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syntax on
filetype on
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.lmx set filetype=xml

After applying it, my .lmx file is highlighted:

Same principle works, for instance, for mysql dumps that I have to do from time to time. If they don't have a .sql extension, you'll get something like:

After

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syntax on
filetype on
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.dump set filetype=sql

everything is fine:

But why and how does it work, you ask?

And that's how you do it, folks.