ifdef-highlighting VS vim-lsp-cxx-highlight

All those vim.org scripts also have a github version https://github.com/vim-scripts/ifdef-highlighting which I tend to use with my plugin manager (although vim.org links also work, I use https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug but there are others that work similarly, and vim has one built in.) If you do it like this, you don't have to think about how to install it, just add something like Plug 'vim-scripts/ifdef-highlighting' and you're done.

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.