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vimemacsfont-lock

Is it possible to change the display of words into symbols in Vim?

I recently ran across a post on Jay Fields' blog, in which Jay uses emacs' font-lock mode to change the display of words into symbols.

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Is there any way to do this in Vim?

Solution

  • Yes, Vim's conceal feature replaces matches with a single replacement character (or none at all). This is integrated into syntax highlighting, see :help :syn-conceal.

    For example, the built-in Tex filetype uses this to display special sequences directly as Greek characters etc.; see :help tex-conceal. The implementation is in runtime/syntax/tex.vim in the standard vim distribution.