Color Coded: A Plugin for Semantic Highlighting

The author of color_coded has really gone the extra mile to implement more semantic highlighting for the C family of languages. To provide real-time tagless highlighting, it actually uses a self-contained clang 3.6.0 (due to bugs in clang). It works with C, C++, and Objective-C.

It highlights as you type, which means it has to know how your program is built. You can add a .color_coded file to your project to give it compiler options.

This plugin adds highlighting groups, and these new groups are based on libclang’s internals. The groups can be found in after/syntax/color_coded.vim.

Using color_coded requires more work than the average plugin because it has a compiled component, and you’ll need to manually compile it:

cd ~/.vim/bundle/color_coded
./configure && make

That means whenever you update it you should recompile it. Also, if you’re using Mac OS X the author suggests using a recent version of MacVim, installed with Lua support. There are full instructions in the readme.