Faster way to type control flow statements (in C and php etc)? - vim

Question

I am new to Vim and I need to speed up my typing for this kind of statements.
if (a == 'e') {
foo();
}
In other text editors, I usually type if() {} first and then insert the text in to the parenthesis and curly braces. If I do this in Vim, I need to switch back to normal, move cursor to middle of () then middle of {}... switch between i and esc ...
What is your suggestion on typing this kind of syntax for Vim beginner? I would be grateful if you can show me the commands for that example step by step.

Answer 1

This is a job for snippet expansion. Take a look at SnipMate or UltiSnips.

Answer 2

snippets are like the built-in :abbreviate on steroids, usually with parameter insertions, mirroring, and multiple stops inside them. One of the first, very famous (and still widely used) Vim plugins is snipMate (inspired by the TextMate editor); unfortunately, it's not maintained any more; though there is a fork. A modern alternative (that requires Python though) is UltiSnips. There are more, see this list on the Vim Tips Wiki.
There are three things to evaluate: First, the features of the snippet engine itself, second, the quality and breadth of snippets provided by the author or others; third, how easy it is to add new snippets.

Answer 3

There are two approaches that solves your goal:
abbreviations
and snippets engines
Abbreviations and the old way of doing things. You just type if and space, and tada! You'll find plenty examples around the web. Only a few will be context-sensitive (i.e. they won't expand within comment or string contexts), or able to take the current project spacing style into consideration. In lh-cpp, you'll find the usual control-statement abbreviations for C and C++, they'll need to be duplicated for similar languages (a runtime ftplugin/c/c_snippets.vim from a php ftplugin should do it in your case)-- in lh-misc I support a couple of others languages (for VimL and shell)
Snippet engines are the trendy way of doing the same thing. This time, you will be able to type i or if and then <tab> (or CTRL+SPACE, or ...). Control-statement snippets won't need to be aware of the current context as we need to explicitly require the expansion. Others have already given links to the trendy snippets engines. Snippets from lh-cpp (which relies on mu-template) take the project style into account when expanding control-statement snippets (i.e. some projects want ) and { on a same line, other want a newline in between, ...)

Answer 4

Here's my answer in case you want to go with vanilla Vim.
In the majority of the cases I guess there is no point in entering the parentheses first and filling in the condition later, just type it all in right away:
if (a == 'e')
Then you can either continue
by typing {}<ESC>:
if (a == 'e') {}
^ cursor is here
The cursor is already placed so you can continue with i<CR> and type the body (if properly configured, Vim should indent for you).
or by typing {<CR>}<ESC>:
if (a == 'e') {
}
^ cursor is here
Then you can enter the body by pressing O (open new line above cursor). Possibly Vim also automatically indents here (it doesn't in my configuration).
If you really want to fill in the condition after you have entered this:
if () {
}
^ cursor
you can do so by typing kf(a.
If anybody knows better ways to do this without plugins, suggestions are welcome.