Category Archives: Vim

Maintain Color-Coded TODO Lists in Vim

Many Vim enthusiasts use Vim for pretty much all text manipulation in their daily lives. However, the plain text nature of this fantastic and powerful editor sometimes leaves a little left to be desired. For example, it would be nice to have your editor color code certain items in your TODO list for you, e.g. one color for items that are done in your list, another (hopefully a more provocative one) for those that aren’t done. I recently discovered a trick how to kind of make that happen in Vim, and I am sharing that here.

The first thing you need is some type of a marker in front of your rows that you want highlighted, so that Vim has a way of doing a RegEx matching against them. E.g.

[TODO] Write a blog post
[DONE] Goof off
[Nice to Have] Read a book

Here I have marked my rows with [TODO], [DONE], and [Nice to Have]

Next up, you need to invoke the following command in the command line mode:

:highlight MyGroupTodo ctermbg=red guibg=red
:let m1 = matchadd(“MyGroupTodo”, “^\[TODO.*”)
:highlight MyGroupDone ctermbg=green guibg=green ctermfg=black guifg=black
:let m2 = matchadd(“MyGroupDone”, “^\[DONE.*”)
:highlight MyGroupNTH ctermbg=cyan guibg=cyan ctermfg=black guifg=black
:let m3 = matchadd(“MyGroupNTH”, “^\[Nice to Have.*”)

coloredListsVim
Here is a screen capture of what it looks like in my current color scheme. Keep in mind that the appearance might be different based on what color scheme you currently have enabled, and you might have to change the colors of the matches to better suit your tastes and your color scheme. Furthermore, you can put these highlight and match commands in your .vimrc so that you don’t have to keep doing it over and over.

Being a visual person I appreciate colors and the ease of distinction that they provide. If that’s you, and you use Vim, then this is how you can do it. Look up :h match inside Vim for more detail. Notice that, in contrast to the example in the Vim help, I have used more specific regular expressions so that the entire line is highlighted – you might or might not want that.