Awesome

vim-cool

Vim-cool disables search highlighting when you are done searching and re-enables it when you search again. That's it. No more :noh<CR>, no more /sytdstdrsid<CR>, and no more dodgy <C-l> mappings.

Vim-cool is cool.

Vim-cool is experimental.

Requirements

Vim-cool is intended to be used with Vim, and only Vim, 7.4.2008 or later. It may or may not work in other editors but they are not and will not be officially supported.

Installation

Follow your favorite plugin/runtimepath manager's instructions.

If you choose manual installation, just put plugin/cool.vim where it belongs:

$HOME/.vim/plugin/cool.vim        on Unix-like systems
$HOME\vimfiles\plugin\cool.vim    on Windows

In Vim 8.0 and above, see :help package.

Setup

The whole assumption behind Vim-cool is that the user enabled search highlighting but they don't want the highlighting to linger on when they are done searching. This implies that the user has the following line in their vimrc:

set hlsearch

That's it. Nothing else to do.

Experimental features

• Show number of matches in the command-line:

  let g:cool_total_matches = 1
  

  

• Do something when we are doing nnnNNnn, do something else or do nothing when we are not:

  set statusline+=%{get(g:,'cool_is_searching',0)?'Yep':''}
  

Background

I wrote the first iteration of vim-cool in about twenty minutes, mostly to test a few ideas I had after a short discussion about 'hlsearch' and :nohlsearch on #vim.

Because it relied almost exclusively on mappings, that first iteration was way too brittle to be of any use and actually messed with a bunch of my own mappings.

Then came @purpleP and the game-changing approach he put together with the help of @chrisbra, @justinmk, @jamessan, and @ZyX-I.

The current version, essentially a weaponized version of @purpleP's code, doesn't rely on mappings anymore and thus should be devoid of nasty side-effects.

Many thanks to @bounceme for his help.

What they say about vim-cool

• puremourning, in #vim:

  vim-cool is by far my favourite plugin

  it's just so... cool.