I recently gained a liking to search result highlighting, it's much more useful than I originally thought. The problem is not the highlighting itself but its persistence. I added a few autocmds to automatically hide it in certain events and a manual shortcut. Works better for me now, though it is annoying that `:noh` has some weird special status that makes it nonfunctional in autocmd.
I tend to avoid plugins for things that I can just do myself with a few keybindings or autocmds. I like that aspect of Vim (and Emacs) where the user is less reliant on plugins because there isn't really a clear, fixed boundary between configuration, scripting and external extensions. Though it comes with downsides (e.g. when plugin developers make the questionable decision of overriding user configuration).
