I'm a kate user but don't have that option on this particular machine.
How do I get vim to highlight matching parenthesis the way kate does?

I know about the "<shift> %" option. Not what I want. So far have added these (and a few other) to .vimrc
set nocompatible
syntax on
set showmatch
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set mat=5

Is there a simple set option for this or is some type of script needed?

Sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum, seemed like a likely place for a good answer.

btw, using Slack 10.1

'set showmatch' highlights the matching braces|brackets|parens when the cursor is on a bracket.

What does kate do that you want vim to do?

Hi -

I think the issue is that vi's "<shift-%>" does brace matching by jumping back and forth between the two braces, whereas kate (and most IDE's and programmer's editors) visually highlight the area between them.

I frankly don't know how to substitute a "visual highlight" for the "jump between" behavior in "vi" (or it's more specialized cousin, "vim").

I googled a little:
1. This page looks interesting (although it doesn't have a solution)
http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

2. I also saw mention of a "RadRails plugin for vim". I haven't tried it, but it might be useful to you:
http://www.radrails.org/

3. RadRails looks less like a plug-in than a full-blown IDE. As I said above (and you undoubtedly already know), most IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans, MSVC, etc etc) and most Programmer's editors (UltraEdit, CodeWright, etc etc) do visual syntax highlighting, hot-key compilation, syntax checking, etc etc

'Hope that helps .. PSM

You highly overestimate my knowledge
Thanks for the info and the links, will check them out.

vls

Thanks for the reply. The behaviour you describe (highlight matching bracket) is what I had hoped for. It doesn't seem to be working that way.

Okay, I've not given quite accurate info, I apologize. showmatch makes the cursor jump back and forth when you type in a bracket.

There's a plugin to do the highlighting thing. Sorry, it's been awhile since I used vim and was thinking showmatch highlighted also.

This is version 7 vim,
Fire up vim then do the colon command thing, :help showmatch
There's a link in the help files to the plugin in question,
pi_paren.txt. Put your cursor on that and hit ctrl-] and it'll jump you to the docs.

I think I got it this time, I hope.

No doubt. I had never looked at vim in any serious way before. The number of options and plugins available is a little mindboggling. Finding features that are more interesting than the one I wanted originally.

Thanks for the help.