Get rid of Vim's highlight after searching text

In VIM, after finding text with "/" command, that text remains highlighted.

What is the command to remove that? I don't want to remove highlighting capability at all, but don't want to have all those bright text spots once I've found what I need.

Thanks.

Type this:

:noh

You can toggle it with

:set hls!

Of course a quick and dirty alternative is to do another search for gibberish:

/asdsad

I usually bind a key to :set hls! to make this easy and use the gibberish approach when I'm in vim on some machine I don't have my profile installed on.

Completely disable search highlights

:set nohlsearch

---

Clear until next search

:nohlsearch

or :noh for short. This clears highlights until a new search is performed or n or N is pressed

---

Clear on pressing custom map

• Clear highlights on hitting the ESC key

   nnoremap <esc> :noh<return><esc>
  

• Clear highlights on pressing </kbd> (backslash) twice

   nnoremap \\ :noh<return>
  

I'm lazy and type something like /asdf then slap the RETURN key.

I have this in my .vimrc:

map <leader>h :set hlsearch!<cr>

So when I type:

\h

It toggles highlighting on/off.

If you don't want to remove highlighting one of the best ways is to clear the search register, unless of course you need the search items later. This will prevent you from having to re-enable the highlighting and(Edit: noh does not permanently disable highlighting) prevent you from accidentally jumping around. This is how I have mine setup:

nmap <silent> ,/ :let@/=""<CR>

What this does is map the key sequence ,/ in normal mode to clear the search register @/ by setting it to an empty string. This is just an alternative to what has already been stated.

In addition to “clear the search register”, you can even reset the search register to its previous value:

command! -nargs=* -range S
\ let atslash=@/|exe ':'.<line1>.','.<line2>.'s'.<q-args>|let @/=atslash

However:

• this does not reset the previous status of :hls. I do not believe this to be possible in general.
• this defines a new command, :S, to use in place of :s. You can use a cabbrev to map one to the other, but this will break when you add a range to the substitute command.

:noh will get rid of highlighted text.

is.vim plugin has been pretty handy for me. It automatically clears the searches in various scenarios, you just need to install it via any plugin manager you use and it will do the work for you, no need to do setup anything or change settings manually. It just works.

(image taken from the official github repository)