Disable (Or Toggle) Text Search Result Highlights In Vim and Neovim

Turning Highlights Off

Neovim/Vim highlights all the matching results when you do a text search in a file buffer. You can hide the highlights after the search with :noh but that's a pain to do every time. To disable them full time, add this to your ~/.config/nvim/init.vim or ~/.vimrc config file:

set nohlsearch

Toggling Highlights

Another option is to toggle the highlights on and off. Instead of using set nohlsearch, this can be done by adding the following to your config file:

set hlsearch!
nnoremap <F5> :set hlsearch!<CR>

With that in place, hitting F5 will switch showing highlights on and off.

One File Only

You can also run those commands directly in a single file buffer (prepended by a :) to apply to just that buffer. That is:

:set nohlsearch

and

set hlsearch!
nnoremap <F5> :set hlsearch!<CR>