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How To Add A File Extension To vim Syntax Highlighting


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on April 2nd, 2008 in Databases, Linux, Programming

Updated: July 8th, 2009

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?

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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:

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Same principle works, for instance, for mysql dumps …

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