What you are looking for is actually called the "Highlighted Reference". This is certainly an intuitive name, as soon as you know it, but maybe not the first thing that appears in your mind, if you are not, you can change the color of the text and background of this option to whatever you want:

I'm not sure how you could completely disable it, but I also canβt imagine why you want ... I use this all the time. You can turn it off by setting the colors that it uses to be the same as your default colors, although I'm not sure since I have never tried.
Alternatively, if you find this feature distracting despite its usefulness, you can make the effect less harsh by specifying a background color that is very similar to your default background color.
Cody gray
source share