beer planet » dump http://beerpla.net where things have nothing to do with beer - tutorials, tips, how-tos, thoughts, hacks, and other techy nonsense Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:25:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How To Add A File Extension To vim Syntax Highlighting http://beerpla.net/2008/04/02/how-to-add-a-vim-file-extension-to-syntax-highlighting/ http://beerpla.net/2008/04/02/how-to-add-a-vim-file-extension-to-syntax-highlighting/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:10:53 +0000 Artem Russakovskii http://beerpla.net/?p=311 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 <?xml but what if my file doesn't have such strings?

image

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

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2
3

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

After...

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]]> 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 <?xml but what if my file doesn't have such strings?

image

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

1
2
3

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

After applying it, my .lmx file is highlighted:

image

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:

image

After

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

everything is fine:

image

But why and how does it work, you ask?

:help au :au[tocmd] [group] {event} {pat} [nested] {cmd}

Add {cmd} to the list of commands that Vim will execute automatically on {event} for a file matching {pat}.
:help BufNewFile When starting to edit a file that doesn't exist.
:help BufRead When starting to edit a new buffer, after reading the file into the buffer.
:help filetype will actually tell this whole story in part B.

And that's how you do it, folks.

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