Toggle Vim Syntax Highlighting

Something I found memorable about Steve Klabnik's Ancient City Ruby 2016 talk was the Vim slides. He did something on-the-fly that caught my attention: disabling Vim syntax highlighting.

Syntax highlighting is useful. As Vim users we try to always have it— when I'm learning a new programming language, one of the first things I do is install the corresponding Vim plugin. It makes my code easier to read and write.

But sometimes it works against you. Code on a projector, code in certain languages, or code that exposes a highlighting edge case or bug in your Vim plugin, may require a different (monochrome) perspective.

:syntax off and :syntax on is all it takes.

See :help syntax for more information.