Add GoLang syntax highlighting for VIM

go, vim, vim-plugin, vim-syntax-highlighting

Solution

you can just add these lines to your `~/.vimrc`:

set rtp+=$GOROOT/misc/vim
filetype plugin indent on
syntax on

EDIT This assumes `filetype plugin indent off` before these lines (i.e. beginning of `.vimrc` file) and may cause problems if it's not. See @peterSO's answer below for the safer version.

Problem

I'm trying to add Go language syntax highlighting to VIM on ubuntu with resources and direction supplied here http://go-lang.cat-v.org/text-editors/vim/. Go comes with a `go.vim` file that contains syntax settings for VIM and the above page offers the following instructions Place $GOROOT/misc/vim/syntax/go.vim in ~/.vim/syntax/ and put the following in ~/.vim/ftdetect/go.vim: ``` au BufRead,BufNewFile *.go set filetype=go ``` This is more or less the same vein of procedure for customizing vim syntax I've seen elsewhere (Vim 7.3 on Ubuntu 12.10 doesn't have 'ftplugin' directory anywhere and https://github.com/jnwhiteh/vim-golang/blob/master/readme.txt) So I think I'm doing the right thing when I create directories: ~/.vim ~/.vim/syntax ~/.vim/ftdetect and follow the above instructions by adding go.vim to ~/.vim/syntax/ and creating a file, go.vim, in ~/.vim/ftdetect/ which contains ``` au BufRead,BufNewFile *.go set filetype=go ``` Yet syntax highlighting does not seem to occur. Is there something I need to do to force VIM to look at these new settings files?

Original source