You should use vim-searchhi instead of searchant.vim. It fixes a bunch of longstanding bugs of searchant.vim and is overall more polished.

Vim plugin for improved search highlighting

When it comes to searching Vim is one of the editors which lacks the feature of highlighting the current search result. Searchant wraps the hacky way to achieve this in Vim into a plugin with a clean interface. Additionally it provides a key mapping to stop the search highlighting.

View the documentation in Vim with :help searchant or on the web.

• Vim 7.0+

It is recommended to install this plugin using a plugin manager like pathogen.vim, Vundle.vim or vim-plug.

Alternatively you can just drop the plugin and doc folders into your ~/.vim directory. Don't forget to run :helptags ~/.vim/doc to generate the help tags after a manual installation.

If you are using incsearch.vim and you'd like vim-searchant to play-nicely, you can add the following snippet to hide the searchant highlight:

" Disable Searchant highlight when incsearch.vim highlights also disable
autocmd CursorMoved * call SearchantStop()
function SearchantStop()
  :execute "normal \<Plug>SearchantStop"
endfunction

This assumes that you have let g:incsearch#auto_nohlsearch = 1 in your config.