Text highlights

Persistent in-buffer highlights — vim's :Mark / :highlight flow, self-contained (no plugin needed). Useful for keeping an eye on a variable while you trace it through a file.

Usage

Command / key	Effect
`:highlight <text>`	Add a highlight for `<text>` (regex-literal). Toggles off on a second call.
`:hl <text>`	Short alias.
`:nohighlight <text>`	Remove the highlight for `<text>`.
`:nohighlight`	Clear every highlight.
`:nohl`	Short alias.
`\m`	Toggle a word-bounded highlight on the word under the cursor.

\m is the default leader-prefixed binding — \ is the default leader, m is the suffix. Set options.leader = "," in your TOML and bind <leader>m if you prefer ,m.

How matching works

There are two flavours of pattern, and they're kept in sync so the same word can't accumulate duplicate entries:

:highlight foo → compiled regex matches foo anywhere (substring). Will paint foo, foobar, and xfoox.
\m on foo → compiled regex \bfoo\b (word-bounded). Will paint foo and a foo b but NOT foobar.

If you :highlight foo and then move the cursor onto another foo and press \m, the existing literal entry is removed (not duplicated). The same goes the other way: \m first, then :highlight foo removes the word-bounded entry. :nohighlight foo matches either form.

Colour palette

Ten curated colours, chosen to stay readable against both light and dark terminal backgrounds:

gold  sky-blue  hot-pink  pale-green  orange
plum  powder-blue  lemon-chiffon  light-pink  light-blue

Each new highlight gets the next unused slot. Once all ten are in use, the next addition drops the oldest entry and reuses its slot — same UX as vim-mark.

Rendering priority

When multiple style layers want the same cell, the priority (highest wins) is:

Active selection (visual / visual-line / visual-block)
Whitespace marks (trailing/tabs, see whitespace-marks.md)
:highlight overlay
Syntax highlighting
Default text style

So a highlighted symbol still looks selected when you v-select it, and trailing-whitespace red wins over a :highlight painted on a trailing match (the rare edge case).

Implementation

src/highlights.rs — the Highlights struct, palette, and toggle logic.
src/highlight_actions.rs — the \m action.
command/builtin.rs — HighlightCmd and NoHighlightCmd.
ui/window_render.rs — applies the overlay per line.