This Vim plugin will highlight all instances of the Perl variable under the cursor. It is a fork of Sandeep.c.r's plugin to do the same for PHP.

(Image credit: Ovid)

Perl variables, of all types, will be highlighted, as will methods.

If you are using a package manager such as Vundle or Pathogen, this plugin should be installed in the standard manner. If you are not (why not?), you could just copy hl-var.vim into your ~/.vim/plugins directory.

Requires Vim version 7.3 or later.

The variables will be highlighted after you have not performed any action for a certain length of time. That time is controlled by the updatetime setting. (See :help updatetime.) The default value is 4000, which is four seconds. That value is too large for this plugin, so I recommend adjusting it to 500, which is half a second. You can experiment with the value which works best for you.

set updatetime=500

You can customise the highlighting applied by this plugin by using the hlvarhl global variable. This can be set in your .vimrc file:

let g:hlvarhl="ctermbg=black ctermfg=red guifg=#ff0000 guibg=#000000 gui=bold"

If you don't want the variable under cursor to be highlighted, you can disable it by setting variable g:hlvarcurrent to 1.

let g:hlvarcurrent = 1

This code is released under the MIT licence, as is Sandeep's original code. See hl-var.vim for the full licence.

This version was forked from Sandeep's repository, with his blessing. Curtis "Ovid" Poe hacked it to support Perl. It is currently being maintained by Paul Johnson.