title: How to highlight words beginning with ‘@’ in Vim syntax?
body: <p>I have a very simple Vim syntax file for personal notes. I would like to highlight people's name and I chose a Twitter-like syntax <code>@jonathan</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>syntax match notesPerson "\&lt;@\S\+"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>To mean: words beginning with <code>@</code> and having at least one non-whitespace character. The problem is that <code>@</code> seems to be a special character in Vim regular expressions.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to escape <code>\@</code> and enclose in brackets <code>[@]</code>, the usual tricks, but that didn't work. I could try something like <code>(^|\s)</code> (beginning of line or whitespace) but that's exactly the problem that word-boundary tries to solve.</p>
  
  <p>Highlighting works on simplified regular expressions, so this is more a question of finding the right regex than anything else. What am I missing?</p>