Vim text coloring

Question

I use echo -e to color my scripts output, it works fine when using standard output.

But when I redirect the output to a file, vim doesn

Answer 1

Redirecting to a file creates that file with all the characters in the input -- including the color escapes. This is actually correct behaviour, and vim is showing you the right thing when it shows these special characters to you.

It seems that perhaps what you're looking for is syntax highlighting. Vim comes with the ability to understand and colorize many different types of text.

Try making sure you have the filetype option correctly set for whatever type of script you're using. Once you get it, you can get vim to set it automatically with the au command. Check out :help filetype for more info.