# Neovim Markdown Frontmatter Syntax Highlighting

I love syntax highlighting. It makes details immediately glanceable that would otherwise be lost in a sea of text. Naturally, when I started working with Hugo, I wanted the yaml/toml frontmatter in my markdown files to have proper syntax highlighting.

## yaml vs toml frontmatter

In general for configuration, I prefer toml to avoid the edge cases of yaml. However for markdown frontmatter where ergonomics is key, I prefer yaml because of its lax quoting rules.

## back to syntax highlighting

I found this blog post, which lead me to create ~/.config/nvim/after/syntax/markdown.vim:

unlet b:current_syntax
syntax include @Yaml syntax/yaml.vim
syntax region yamlFrontmatter start=/\%^---$/ end=/^---$/ keepend contains=@Yaml
syntax include @Toml syntax/toml.vim
syntax region tomlFrontmatter start=/\%^+++$/ end=/^+++$/ keepend contains=@Toml

And that only works for yaml. It can work for toml if i put toml first, but I can’t seem to get it to work for both. Alas.

Now my frontmatter looks like this:

Nice.