Add Jinja Syntax Highlighting To Neovim

April 2023

I'm using the Minijinja^mj Rust crate to make the templates for Neopolitan^neo. It's a solid format but it's a bit hard to look at. Especially without syntax highlighting which doesn't appear to be available by default in Neovim^g:nvim.

I tried a plugin^plug to add the highlights but caused a bunch of errors every time I started up.

This is the process I ended up going with:

Create the directory:

~/.config/nvim/syntax
Download the jinja.vim 1.1 and htmljinja.vim 1.0 files from this page and put them in the syntax directory
Make a new file at:

~/.config/nvim/syntax/synload.vim

and put this in it:

au Syntax jinja   runtime! syntax/htmljinja.vim
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.jinja,*.j2  setf jinja

That got syntax highlighting working for me. It doesn't do automatic indention. That would be nice but if I had to choose one or the other I'd choose syntax highlighting over the indention.

I've forked the other repo so can take a look at it as well.

Notes

The plugin with the errors is two years old so I'm not surprised it has problems
The syntax files are closer to 20yrs old, but thankfully they still work just fine

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