Vim Syntax Highlighting does not work

Question

I\'ve installed a fresh Arch Linux system on my laptop and downloaded the vim package.

I haven\'t altered the .vimrc file, but the syntax highlighting doesn\'t seem to w

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. I could not have syntax highlighting on. I also found that gvim launched without pulldown menus or toolbar icons. It turned out I did not have the vim-runtime package properly installed. In my case I was on debian jessie with a large set of files missing under /usr/share/vim/vim74/ directory.

$ ls /usr/share/vim/vim74/
debian.vim  doc/  rgb.txt

The solution was to run:

$ sudo aptitude reinstall vim-runtime

That fixed the problem for me, for syntax highlighting and for missing menus/icons in gvim. I'm not sure why my system was in this state, but the reinstall of the above package solved both issues.