vim-lsp-cxx-highlight VS neovim

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.

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.