Colorful vi

[Vintovka]

When I edit a shell script as my regular user account, keywords within the script are colorful. Variables are dark blue, text inside double-quotes is pink, shell commands are yellow, comments after a # are cyan.

When I edit the same files using vi as root, there are no colors. My guess is that this is configured in .profile or .bash_profile or something like that in each user's home directory, but I cannot find the specific file. So, do anyone know how to make vi colorful for root as well?

Thanks in advance...

[oz]

Hello

If you haven't tried it, I believe vim can display in color as root user but not sure about vi.

Maybe someone else will have more info for you.

[AnitaHummer]

you would be better suited using vim.

[atreyu]

First make sure vim is installed, as was suggested:

which vim

If installed, it will likely be in /usr/bin/vim.

Now as root, do this, in a terminal:

which vi

if it reports an alias pointing to 'vim', then no changes needed there. if it reports 'vi', then put something like this in root's ~/.bashrc:

alias vi='/usr/bin/vim'

now source the file, so that vi is aliased to vim.

next, open a file as root with vi, say /etc/bashrc (so we know there is syntax highlighting to be able to see). in it turn on syntax highlighting with this:

:syntax on

If the colors do not appear, then something is wrong - post back. But if the colors do appear, then quit out of vi and add something like this to your vim profile, ~/.vimrc:

syntax on

That should do it.

NOTE: some versions of Fedora/Red Hat would put a line in /etc/profile.d/vim.sh to not allow root users to alias vi to vim for some crazy ass reason.