Highlighting matching parens matchparen

Nvim :help pages, generated from source using the tree-sitter-vimdoc parser.

The functionality mentioned here is a standard-plugin. This plugin is only available if 'compatible' is not set.

You can avoid loading this plugin by setting the "loaded_matchparen" variable:

:let loaded_matchparen = 1

The plugin installs CursorMoved, CursorMovedI and WinEnter autocommands to redefine the match highlighting.

:NoMatchParen :DoMatchParen

To disable the plugin after it was loaded use this command:

:NoMatchParen

And to enable it again:

:DoMatchParen

The highlighting used is MatchParen. You can specify different colors with the ":highlight" command. Example:

:hi MatchParen ctermbg=blue guibg=lightblue

By default the plugin will highlight both the paren under the cursor and the matching one using the hl-MatchParen highlighting group. This may result in the cursor briefly disappearing from the screen as the MatchParen colors take over the cursor highlight. To prevent this from happening and have the plugin only highlight the matching paren and not the one under the cursor (effectively leaving the cursor style unchanged), you can set the "matchparen_disable_cursor_hl" variable:

:let matchparen_disable_cursor_hl = 1

The characters to be matched come from the 'matchpairs' option. You can change the value to highlight different matches. Note that not everything is possible. For example, you can't highlight single or double quotes, because the start and end are equal.

The syntax highlighting attributes are used. When the cursor currently is not in a string or comment syntax item, then matches inside string and comment syntax items are ignored. Any syntax items with "string" or "comment" somewhere in their name are considered string or comment items.

The search is limited to avoid a delay when moving the cursor. The limits are:

What is visible in the window.

100 lines above or below the cursor to avoid a long delay when there are closed folds.

'synmaxcol' times 2 bytes before or after the cursor to avoid a delay in a long line with syntax highlighting.

A timeout of 300 msec (60 msec in Insert mode). This can be changed with the "g:matchparen_timeout" and "g:matchparen_insert_timeout" variables and their buffer-local equivalents "b:matchparen_timeout" and "b:matchparen_insert_timeout".

If you would like the % command to work better, the |matchit| plugin can be used. This plugin also helps to skip matches in comments. This is unrelated to the matchparen highlighting, they use a different mechanism.