vim - Is it possible to not trigger my normal search highlighting when using search as a movement?

When I do a search in vim, I like to have my results highlighted and super-visible, so I give them a bright yellow background and a black foreground in my .vimrc.

" When highlighting search terms, make sure text is contrasting colors
:highlight Search guibg=yellow guifg=black

(This is for GUI versions of vim, like MacVim or Gvim; for command-line, you'd use ctermbg and ctermfg.)

But I sometimes use search with a command, as in c/foo - "change from the cursor to the next occurrence of foo."

In that case, I don't want all the occurrences of foo to be highlighted.

Can I turn off highlighting only in cases where search is used as a movement for a command?

Answer

These naive mappings seem to help.

• 
  

  normal search

  
  

  Turn highlighting on before doing the search:

  
  

  nnoremap / :set hls/
  



• 
  

  motion search

  
  

  Turn highlighting off before doing the search:

  
  

  nnoremap v/ :set nohlsv/
  nnoremap d/ :set nohlsd/
  nnoremap y/ :set nohlsy/
  nnoremap c/ :set nohlsc/
  

Note that you'd need to setup similar mapping for ?.