 <p>You would probably want to use a PHP syntax file such as: <a href="http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1571" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1571</a></p> <p>FWIW: Personally I am enjoying learning vim at the moment but still prefer netbeans for PHP development because it has many features that I need, such as automatic scp to a remote server and remote debugging with XDebug.</p>