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?
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:
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
1 2 3 | syntax on filetype on au BufNewFile,BufRead *.dump set filetype=sql |
everything is fine:
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.
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
