Highlighting a search term without moving the cursor

skyblue’s answer shows the core of the idea of how to use the normal search highlighting to accomplish what you want.

I extended that technique by making a keybinding that works similarly to the * command, but without actually moving to the next match.

My thanks goes to garyjohn for pointing out the expand() equivalent to *’s word selection (to avoid using * itself and restoring the view). This simplifies the code enough so that it can go directly in the mapping (obviates using a function). I have also added a mapping that matches partial words (like g*).

:" The leader defaults to backslash, so (by default) this
:" maps \* and \g* (see :help Leader).
:" These work like * and g*, but do not move the cursor and always set hls.
:map <Leader>* :let @/ = '\<'.expand('<cword>').'\>'\|set hlsearch<C-M>
:map <Leader>g* :let @/ = expand('<cword>')\|set hlsearch<C-M>

You could also set the search register to the variable you want to match.

First, make sure search highlighting is turned on:

:set hlsearch

Then, you can set the search register with:

:let @/="variable"

This will highlight all occurrences of variable without jumping to the next match.

For more information, see :help @/

One way is to use the :match command, e.g.,

:match Question '^R^W'

That will highlight the word under the cursor using the Question highlight group. I often use the Question group because on my terminal it's a nice green. To see the available highlight groups, execute

:hi

The ^R and ^W are Ctrl-R and Ctrl-W, respectively, and are replaced by the word under the cursor. See

:help c_CTRL-R_CTRL-W

for more on that. See

:help :match

for more on the :match command. To clear that highlighting, simply execute

:match

with no arguments.