Keeping syntax color foreground in vim search highlight

Question

In Vim, is it possible to get the foreground text in a highlighted search match to keep the colors specified by my colorscheme? If possible, I'd like to customize just the background color of the match (hi Search ctermbg=BLAH) and keep the foreground colors the same as they were before the match. I suspect that this isn't possible with the built-in hlsearch, but I figured I'd check.

Jake Grossman Jake Grossman · Accepted Answer · 2020-10-28T19:33:06

That's actually exactly how it works, if you clear the Search highlight group beforehand. Following the ideas outlined in this gist by romainl, you could do the following:

augroup MyColors
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorScheme * highlight clear Search
                      \ | highlight Search ctermbg={blah}
augroup END
colorscheme foo

Note that in order for the autocmd to take effect you must set your colorscheme after your autocmd.

Keeping syntax color foreground in vim search highlight

1 Answers