Mark Shust demonstrates how to enable syntax highlighting in Vim. He shows that running ":syntax on" in Vim immediately enables coloring for the current file, and explains how to make it permanent by adding the line "syntax on" to a ~/.vimrc file in your home directory so all files open with syntax highlighting automatically.
Sometimes when you edit a file in vim, e.g. this diff file, you won't see any syntax coloring. Vim doesn't always colorize and syntax highlight files, but there's an easy way to turn this on, and that is by typing a colon and then typing syntax on. This makes things a lot easier to read and reason about. There's a way to do this automatically though, with all files. Let's go ahead and exit back to terminal and and then create or open a new file in your home directory named.vimrc. and then in this file all you have to do is type syntax on, and when you save it and head back to your previous div file, it will be colored for you automatically. After doing this, hopefully you never have to worry about syntax highlighting in vim again.
