clangd_extensions.nvim VS vim-lsp-cxx-highlight

There are a plugins like clang extensions that offers such features.

I personally do use clangd with this amazing plugin and love it

Yup, neovim with this fantastic plugin to handle clangd

For C++, I recommend using the builtin neovim lsp, along with nvim-lspconfig, https://github.com/p00f/clangd_extensions.nvim, and clang-format through null-ls.

clangd_extensions.nvim for clangd's off-spec features

There is https://github.com/p00f/clangd_extensions.nvim available which provides inline hints and a little bit more. Check it.

You should also take a look at https://github.com/p00f/clangd_extensions.nvim

clangd extension

This vim plugin has worked for me for semantic highlighting: https://github.com/jackguo380/vim-lsp-cxx-highlight

" This file contains common and basic plugins too essential not to include " See https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/wiki/tutorial " Auto install vim-plug (if not already installed) if empty(glob('~/.config/nvim/autoload/plug.vim')) silent !curl -fLo ~/.config/nvim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim autocmd VimEnter * PlugInstall endif " Run PlugInstall if there are missing plugins autocmd VimEnter * if len(filter(values(g:plugs), '!isdirectory(v:val.dir)')) \| PlugInstall --sync | source $MYVIMRC \| endif " enable Vim-Plug: call plug#begin('~/.config/nvim/plugged') " Install/update plugins Plug 'https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary.git' Plug 'https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox' " Better C/C++ syntax highlighting; Plug 'https://github.com/jackguo380/vim-lsp-cxx-highlight' call plug#end() "---------- Basic configs ---------------------------------------------------- autocmd vimenter * ++nested colorscheme gruvbox " Enable transparent background let g:gruvbox_transparent_bg = 1

By looking around the Web, I think you can maybe do what you want in Vim with this plugin, which requires you to setup an LSP server for C (note: I haven't tried it). Otherwise, the way Vim makes its syntax highlighting (natively) simply cannot compete with tree-sitter or LSP-based highlighting which construct the entire AST of your code, because C's syntax is too complex. There is a proposal to include an alternative syntax highlighting system, but work on it hasn't even started as far as I know, so vim-lsp-cxx-highlight and tree-sitter are really the only way to highlight identifiers in C/C++.

I use coc.nvim with e.g. coc-clangd extension (with https://github.com/jackguo380/vim-lsp-cxx-highlight for extra highlighting, but that might not be necessary anymore with some recent update I think I read somewhere) which has a similar feature, but uses the compiler settings from a compile_commands.json or some configuration file to know which defines are which value, to do this kind of ifdef block highlighting.

I was abled to build ccls on a RHEL 6 machine which also supports semantic highlighting with the help of this plugin. Would suggest to try that out.