How to make it so my variable names are highlighted?

• nvim-treesitter

  300 9,487 9.9 Scheme

  Nvim Treesitter configurations and abstraction layer

  

Vim's regex-based syntax highlighting cannot detect variables in C code. If you don't mind switching to Neovim, you can use nvim-treesitter to use tree-sitter queries to highlight C files (a default set of queries is available out of the box, which do highlight variables) instead.

• vim-lsp-cxx-highlight

  7 335 0.0 Vim Script

  Vim plugin for C/C++/ObjC semantic highlighting using cquery, ccls, or clangd

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++.

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• Vim

  424 34,912 9.9 Vim Script

  The official Vim repository

  

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++.

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