Michael Young [81nassau]

I recently tried installing gvim on my mac (highly disappointing) and accidentally wiped out my old .vimrc file in the process. The old .vimrc file had the settings to enable color syntax. So after uninstalling gvim, I was left with the default vim (v6.2) with no color syntax. Easy enough to fix, so I searched google for the settings, since I can never remember them. There are plenty of posts which will tell you to do the following to enable color syntax from vim:

:set term=builtin_beos-ansi
:syntax on


This gave me some weak syntax coloring/markup, where the only coloring was red and most of the code in a file (I was looking at a php file) was underlined. So, I set the term to “ansi” and it fixed things nicely.

:set term=ansi
:syntax on


Drop those lines into your ~/.vimrc file (without the colons) and you should be set…. assuming you have all of the syntax files installed on your machine.