Today my screen is a bit dark – or rather, the office is bright, what with all the sun outside. This makes some of the colors of vim’s syntax highlighting hard to read. How do you turn this on or off?

After you open a file, and press ESC. With:

:syntax off

you can turn the highlighting off; with:

:syntax on

you can turn it on again.

If you want to do this permanently, you can edit (or create) the file .vimrc to include the line:

syntax off

I know this is a tiny thing, but I can now read my text files again. 😉