Highlighting toggles on when sourcing vimrc containing set hlsearch

[craigmac]

When I have set hlsearch set in my vimrc file and I source it, vim-cool highlights the last search. From my quick look, it seems to be triggered by the OptionSet autocmd. If I commented out set hlsearch in my vimrc and source it, no highlighting appears. Is there a way to have set hlsearch in your vimrc without having vim-cool re-highlight last search when I source the file?

[romainl]

Hmm… what is the output of :echo &viminfo?

[craigmac]

'100,<50,s10,h

[romainl]

Yeah, the reasoning behind this is that set hlsearch is an explicit attempt to activate search highlighting, and thus that the expected outcome is to have the last search matches highlighted. In short: one enables "feature that highlights something" -> one gets highlighting. A bit like syntax on: you enable syntax highlighting, you get syntax highlighting.

Now, two questions:

• is it really explicit if it's done as part of :source $MYVIMRC?
• isn't that a special case that requires special handling?

[craigmac]

Could there be a workaround to check if the OptionSet was fired as result of last command being the sourcing of a Vim filetype buffer?

[romainl]

OptionSet has a rich API but it doesn't have that information. We can probably parse the output of :verbose set hlsearch?, but how to discriminate between the vimrc being sourced normally, as part of the startup process, and the vimrc being sourced manually? Maybe by inspecting the history?

[craigmac]

Yeah, I'm not sure there's a foolproof way to do it. For now, I'm just going to stick a call my :nohlsearch binding manually after I save my vimrc: autocmd BufWritePost $MYVIMRC nested source $MYVIMRC | call feedkeys("\<C-l>")

[acc987]

I don't use vim-cool, but even with a :noh mapping one will also suffer from the issue you described and I worked around it by using a dedicated mapping for sourcing $MYVIMRC:

nnoremap <silent> ,s :source $MYVIMRC<C-R>=v:hlsearch ? '' : ' <Bar> nohlsearch'<CR><CR>