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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

I only notice vim 9.0 because it highlights as you search. Otherwise I'm in total agreement.

I didn't find that feature to be that handy tbh. Mostly because it necessitates me to search for the pattern manually. What I usually want in my workflow is to highlight the word under the cursor automatically. This simplifies the code reading significantly for me and I am not aware of such Vim feature baked in?

Luckily it's very easy to add one, e.g.

  function! HighlightWordUnderCursor()
      if getline(".")[col(".")-1] !~# '[[:punct:][:blank:]]'
          exec 'match' 'Search' '/\V\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>/'
      else
          match none
      endif
  endfunction
  autocmd! CursorHold,CursorHoldI * call HighlightWordUnderCursor()

Or, a stupid way: “#*” Or, also stupid: “*``”

“:set hlsearch” in pretty much any version of vim. (I don't know if vim 9.0 changed the default or not.)

No, it didn't. Vim rarely changes defaults, if at all, but it can add settings to example rc files.

That's very odd, then... I definitely remember hlsearch being off in Vim 8, and on in Vim 9.

Either way thank you! Now I have even less reason to notice.

Probably distro-specific, so up to package maintainers.

Note that some Linux distros provide their own versions of vimrc that overrides the upstream default settings. Note also that newer Vim versions come with a "defaults.vim" that you can load if you want, containing arguably sensible inoffensive defaults; if you or your distro loaded that, it might contain hlsearch as well.

Vim did that in 1994 already.

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