If you like working with a dark background and enjoy syntax highlighting but hate the navy blue on black, try putting the following line in your ~/.vimrc:

set background=dark

If you're on a dark background terminal, the hightlighting after searching in vim can be maddening. To turn it off for the session, type :set nohls.

If you would like to have syntax highlighting on a file that would otherwise not have any highlighting at all, you can symlink the file to the appropriate extension and open it:

$ ln -s example.lxp example.html
$ vi example.html # opened with pretty highlighting

*Note: This should be used sparingly and you should clean up your symlinks.