Red Hat Knowledgebase

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux the vi text editor is aliased to vim, an enhanced version of vi. Some people do not like the colors and highlighting of vim and want it to look like the old vi.

The easiest way to fix this is to turn off the syntax of vim. Type the following command in vim, to turn the colors off.

:syntax off

If you wish to turn the colors and highlighting back on just type:

:syntax on

vim is a very customizable program with a wide variety of syntax options. You can even create you own color and highlighting schemes. More information is available in the documentation accessible by typing the following:

:help

:help syntax