text editor suggestion?

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

John Salerno wrote:
> Sybren Stuvel wrote:
> > John Salerno enlightened us with:
> >> But what about customizing syntax coloring? Is this also in the same
> >> file? I've noticed a separate file called python.vim (in Windows,
> >> this file exists in a 'syntax' folder, and also another file of the
> >> same name in an 'indent' folder, so I'm *still* confused about which
> >> files are used for which settings.
> >
> > And you're also confused about what things are settings and what
> > aren't.
>
> No, my point was just that there are more files needed than just the
> .vimrc file if you want to do some extra customization. I'd like to
> change the syntax highlighting to specific colors for each group of
> keywords, and you can't do that in the settings file.

You can do all your color schemes/syntax highlighting changes in the
.vimrc file.

People normally split them out and :source other files to keep things
tidy, and there are some ways (plugins) to package things up nicely to
distribute to others, but fundamentally it's all just vim commands and
putting everything in the .vimrc is perfectly fine.  E.g. if I want to
change it so that identifiers are in another color from the default I
just add:

:highlight Identifier guifg=DarkSlateGrey

to the .vimrc  (or change ctermfg to a terminal color to change the
colors in non-gui vim)

> I'm not even sure
> you can do that at all, or if you have to settle for pre-made color
> schemes. I haven't looked into how difficult it is to make your own
> color scheme.

It's easy.  You just use a bunch of highlight statements like the
above.  There are examples in the vim runtime directory.  You can try
them out with a simple:

:colorscheme koehler
:colorscheme desert
:colorscheme default

etc.

>  (And does vim support bold text?)

If your terminal supports it, yeah.