I'm working inside the vi text editor on Red Hat 8.0 at the moment. I don't remember how I did it, only that I tripped over the keyboard as I was typing quickly earlier and I inadvertently caused a word to appear highlighted at each occurrence of the word in the file. For example, when the word "item" appears in the file, it exists inside a tan colored box. All the other words appear against the standard background. I'd like to get rid of this effect. If anyone knows vi well enough to help me with this that would be great. Thanks in advance.

Okay I've found a file in my home directory called ".viminfo" and looking through it I find two lines of interest

#Last Search Pattern:
~Msle0~/\<item\>

So I assume that's the enemy line. I attempt to comment it out using "#" in front of the second line but when I attempt to apply it using "source .viminfo" the terminal is populated with errors and the .viminfo is restored to the way it was before I made the change. I also tried removing both lines completely then logging out and logging back in but the result was the same.

So how do I a) comment, remove the line or 2) in vi some how remove the search pattern for the word "item".

Thanks...

1. Open a console window and login as root using the su command
2. Open /etc/vimrc
3. Find the line with "syntax on "
4. place a " in front of the line.
5. save the file.. your set ..

Thanks for your reply. I didn't find the file /etc/vimrc or /etc/.vimrc but I managed to get around this ...Above the two lines I mentioned previously I find the lines:

# hl search on (H) or off (h)
~H

And so I changed that second line to :

~h

which I assumed means "off" and indeed the highlighting effect is gone.

Thanks for your time though.