Highlight the whole current line

Question

What is the best way to highlight the whole current line in Vim? In some IDEs I am able to set some sort of 20% opacity of the line I am editing, this is great to find where I am rather quickly.

Adminicle

Related: vimrc - How can I change the colour of the line highlighted with the 'cursorline' option? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange – Adrianeadrianna

Answer 1

To highlight the current line use

:set cursorline

To highlight the current column use

:set cursorcolumn

The visual appearance of this can be modified. Have a look around :help hl-CursorLine or hl-CursorColumn.

Embryotomy

Answer 2

See the Vim wiki on this subject for the complete story.

I especially found the following bit handy (when working with more than one window).

autocmd WinEnter * setlocal cursorline
autocmd WinLeave * setlocal nocursorline

Only highlight the current line in the active window.

Nomadic

Answer 3

Shift + V puts you in visual mode, highlighting the entire line.

Detritus

It makes sense. Sorry for the confusion. – Adminicle

This enters Vim in Visual Mode though. When you are going to move to another line, the lines in between will be highlighted as well. – Navar

good point, although because this changes mode, it's unusable for cases when i'm iterating over * search results. – Excruciation