Color highlight columns in Vim

Vim 7.3 has a new, useful feature that allows you to highlight (set the background color) of one or more columns of the document you are working on. This comes in handy if you are working with a file that uses a fixed width format. For example, if you want to quickly see the 44th column for every row as you scan through a file, this might assist in the task.

Vim 7.3 is not yet in the Ubuntu repositories officially, but a PPM is available here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/7283/where-can-i-find-vim-7-3

Once installed, use vim help to get details about colorcolumn.

:help colorcolumn

This will show you:

'colorcolumn' 'cc'      string  (default "")
                        local to window
                        {not in Vi}
                        {not available when compiled without the |+syntax|
                        feature}
        'colorcolumn' is a comma separated list of screen columns that are
        highlighted with ColorColumn |hl-ColorColumn|.  Useful to align
        text.  Will make screen redrawing slower.
        The screen column can be an absolute number, or a number preceded with
        '+' or '-', which is added to or subtracted from 'textwidth'. 

                :set cc=+1  " highlight column after 'textwidth'
                :set cc=+1,+2,+3  " highlight three columns after 'textwidth'
                :hi ColorColumn ctermbg=lightgrey guibg=lightgrey

        When 'textwidth' is zero then the items with '-' and '+' are not used.
        A maximum of 256 columns are highlighted.

In practice you only need to :set cc=n, as there are default colors.