Enabling markdown highlighting in Vim

Question

I'm using Vim in a terminal on my MacBook Air with OS X Lion, and I can't seem to find a good plugin for Markdown syntax highlighting.

So far I've tried the plasticboy plugin and Tim Pope's plugin. The plasticboy plugin worked OK but was causing white space at the end of lines to be highlighted, and I haven't figured out how to turn that off. (It's really annoying, because every time I hit space when I'm writing it highlights the character.)

Tim's plugin didn't seem to do very much in the way of highlighting, other than maybe headers that use ###. Code blocks and bullets are ignored. I might be missing something there. I do use the .md extension on my Markdown files, so it should be picking up the filetype.

I've also seen a reference to Vim 7.3 having Markdown support built in, but without one of those two plugins I don't get any highlighting at all.

Do either of these require specific color schemes to work?

Answer 1

About the native syntax highlight for markdown I think it only works for files with the extension .markdown by default.
I was having problems with markdown syntax highlight for my .md files.
I tried:

:set syntax=markdown

And it worked. So i included the following line in my .vimrc:

au BufNewFile,BufFilePre,BufRead *.md set filetype=markdown

Now my vim have syntax highlight for my .md files.

BufFilePre is needed for :sav