How do I get Vim to highlight matching parenthesis?

Question

When I browse code in Vim, I need to see opening and closing parenthesis/ brackets, and pressing % seems unproductive.

I tried :set showmatch, bu

Answer 1

An upgrade of vim from version 6.3 to 8.0 might swap/upgrade the code file that manages this MatchParen functionality under /usr/share/vim/vim80/plugin/matchparen.vim

The function to begin investigating a vim failure for highlighting matching brackets is called: Highlight_Matching_Pair(). Do an echo and a sleep and step through the code until matchaddpos(...) runs.