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Highlight non-breaking space in VIM, different behavior between command and .vimrc

I want non-breaking space to be immediatly highlighted when I type one in VIM, because my keyboard's layout makes me sometimes write non-breaking space instead of normal space, and then it's a hard time debugging.

I found a cool trick, entering the command :

:syntax match ErrorMsg " "

does exactly what I want (the space between quotes is a non-breaking space)

Now when I add this command to .vimrc (without the beginning colon) it doesn't work… any idea?

Solution

  • May depend on how you are entering it into .vimrc, but try:

    au VimEnter,BufWinEnter * syn match ErrorMsg " "

    Personally I think it would make more sense to map the typing of that space to the Space -- how often do you need to type a non-breaking space? Or maybe you can fix the issue at its source: the keyboard layout.