When I'm in VIM insert mode, it wonderfully adds matching end characters. E.g. if I type " it will add another " immediately after the cursor. Similarly for parenthesis, braces etc. when programming.
How can I quickly skip over the inserted character, while staying in insert mode? The best I've found is to use the forward arrow key, but that's not conveniently located.
Accordingly, I either type the closing character, or I <esc>li (exit insert mode, move right one character, re-enter insert mode). This reduces the convenience of the auto-insertion quite dramatically, so I figure I'm missing something obvious.
(Note, for convenience I'm using the handy SPF13 curated collection of plugins and running MacVIM. Edit: This is the autoclose script providing the matching.)
There's basically no way to get out of an autoclosed pair that doesn't involve pressing at least one key.
The standard mechanism provided by all the autoclosing plugins is simple: type the closing character. You can also press <Right> or, if you are at the end of the line, <End>.
Maybe your plugin gives you another mechanism but you'll have to find out for yourself.
Whatever key you press, you'll still do at the very least exactly the same amount of typing as you'd do without autoclosing.
Autoclosing is not about saving typing, the only practical use of that feature is to prevent unmatched pairs. That's all and, I think, the "obvious" thing you are missing.
As you are using a SPF13 and don't know which plugins brought the mapping. There are two things that we can do
1) I usually esc followed by A. This will kept you in insert mode after the closed character if it is the last character. I usually prefer this over the second one.
2) You can circumvent the automatic closing by ctrl - v before the character, for instance ". This will not autoclose the corresponding character and you are responsible for the closing.
Related
I am trying to find replacement for multi cursors plugin and found out cgn command pretty useful. However, there is undesirable behavior using arrow keys during insert mode. Sometimes there is no need to change the whole search entry (e.g. fix typo) so the arrow keys are necessary in that case. To reproduce the "bug" you can type tabe and then 3ifoobar<Enter><Esc>/foo<Enter>cgn<End>bar<Esc>.
No matter what movement you will use: arrow keys or key like <End> - powerful dot command stops working. I mean it just inserts text written after movement at the same position instead of changing the next search entry.
The only way to support redo, consists in using <C-G>U before <right> and <left>. This requires has('patch-7.4.849')
If you need to move to the end of the line, you'll need to count. If you need to move to the next line, you'll loose redo.
If I write an if statement in my C program, press enter three times, then write a comment, the below is my output. Notice the two lines between the condition and the comment are completely empty.
if(my_condition) {
<Tab>// My comment here
My issue is that Vim does not insert any tab character(s) between the beginning of the line and the cursor position until a character is typed. This is very annoying for me, because I like to move my cursor up and down the block of code often. Since there isn't a real tab on the two lines, if I moved up one line my cursor would go to the beginning of the line, instead of staying on the same column. I come from Sublime Text and other editors where this has never been a problem.
Is there a plugin or setting such that I can accomplish the following?
if(my_condition) {
<Tab>
<Tab>
<Tab>// My comment here
All help is appreciated. I've looked into using Visual mode, but have had undesirable side effects of enabling it all the time. Certainly there is a simple way to automatically add the tabs when I make a new line?
This is very annoying for me, because I like to move my cursor up and down the block of code often.
Well, as you might have noticed, switching to vim means that you need to change your own editing behavior. And that might be the toughest, more than learning the new commands, because habits die hard!
I'm not saying that you should stop scrolling around your function in an useless manner, though, but that you should stop moving around with the "cursor" keys in insert mode.
When you're doing movements when in insert mode it has the side effect you're exposing as "inconvenient", but it also has the side effect of breaking the "repeat" command (.). After a cursor movement in insert mode, a . will only repeat characters typed after that movement.
So, what you should consider in your editing behavior, is to avoid empty lines, avoid trailing spaces/tabs and never move around in insert mode. Insert mode is for insertion, and the normal mode is for moving around and doing actions on the text.
There are a lot of move commands you can abuse in normal mode (j/k, <C-e>/<C-y>, {/}, …).
That being said, if you get yourself in a situation where you've fscked the indentation, you might want to keep on editing, not caring about the indent, and once you're back in normal mode issue a =i{ that will indent everything within the block following the syntax file (and your indent settings).
In traditional text editors, whenever I needed to open a string or parentheses and type something between it I used to do:
Type () or ""
Press left
Type in what I need
Press right
But in vim (that is if I followed the vim way) the process becomes quite tedious as I have to enter the normal mode to move a whole bunch of times:
Type () or ""
Press <ESC>
Press i
Type what I need
Press <ESC>
Press l
Press a
If it is not a good practice to use the arrow keys at any time, is there a more efficient way of doing this kind of task in vim?
It is actually quite easy to automatically append those closing characters in a mapping, and put your cursor where you want it. The trick is to do that, without also messing up the undo/redo/repeat actions. The problem is that cursor movement commands in insert mode will break the "undo sequence" so that any change you make after moving the cursor is undone separately from changes made before moving the cursor.
Warning: the following information may become dated
There are plenty of plugins available to automatically append these characters (see the partial list at the Vim wiki page for appending closing characters), and prior to Vim 7.4, some of them even had complicated workarounds for keeping the undo sequence intact. Unfortunately, they all relied on a bug in Vim that got fixed in version 7.4 for this.
A patch is available to add a cursor movement that does not break undo, so if you want to compile Vim yourself, you can grab that patch and use mappings like the following (no plugin required!) to do what you want:
inoremap ( ()<C-G>U<Left>
inoremap <expr> ) strpart(getline('.'), col('.')-1, 1) == ")" ? "\<C-G>U\<Right>" : ")"
These mappings will insert "()" when you type an opening (, placing the cursor in between the parentheses. When you type ')' and there is already a closing ')' after the cursor, Vim will skip over the parenthesis instead of inserting a new one. Cursor movement is preceded by <C-G>U which is the feature the aforementioned patch adds, allowing the following cursor movement to not break the undo sequence (as long as the movement is all in a single line).
As of Vim 7.4.663, this patch has still not been officially included.
No. Doing it in Vim is exactly the same as in your "traditional" editor:
Type () or ""
Press left
Type in what you need
Press right
But… why don't you type the opening character, what you want inside the pair and then the closing character?
Type ( or "
Type what you need
Type ) or "
Too simple?
I think using arrow keys to move around is bad practice in normal mode but in your case; moving one space while in insert mode, I would hazard to say using the arrow keys is probably best practice.
That being said if you are dead set on avoiding them you could use <i_ctrl-o>.
:help i_ctrl_o
CTRL-O execute one command, return to Insert mode *i_CTRL-O*
So, while in insert mode, you could type: ()<ctrl-o>h<xxx><ctrl-o>l, where <xxx> is whatever you want in the brackets.
Unfortunately that doesn't work if you cursor is on the last character of the line, which if you are typing it most likely is.
To solve that problem do :set virtualedit+=onemore or add it to your ~/.vimrc file.
Note that this solution is more keystrokes than simply using the arrow keys but you don't need to move your hands away from the home row so it may be faster anyway.
I'm trying to "ease" into VIM as my primary coding editor. I find that I'm still making plenty of "mistrokes" as I learn the many modes/features of VIM. While I'm in insert mode, I notice that combinations of keystrokes will produce special characters - mostly characters in non-latin alphabets.) I would like to disable this for now. Is it possible? In order words, to prevent multi-byte characters from being displayed in insert mode?
EDIT: (added example)
One example of this is when I delete a character (delete key on mac keyboard) and follow this quickly with another character. For example, delete+d produces " ﺽ " .
Thanks!
Steve
This sounds suspiciously like keys not timing out as controlled by 'timeout', 'timeoutlen', 'ttimeout' and 'ttimeoutlen'. You might try
:set timeout timeoutlen=5000 ttimeoutlen=50
which should cut the time vim will wait between keystrokes to see if they're the "same" (pseudo-)key down to 50ms.
The exact numbers you want would vary depending on your connection. If you're editing over a low-bandwidth connection, you might have to bump up the 50ms to something higher if you use function keys, 6-pack, or arrow keys (anything that transmits as a sequence of characters).
In vim, typing the two characters with a backspace between them will produce a digraph if the digraph option is set. If you want to disable this, see if there is a set digraph in your vimrc and remove it.
Your terminal settings probably map the delete key to backspace.
If you don't want that, you have to change that in the settings.
Is it possible to select multiple non-consecutive lines (or sections) in VIM's visual mode? If so, how?
No, this is not possible without plugins.
But you can copy multiple lines into the same buffer, if that solves your problem.
To start the 'Accumulation Buffer':
mark a section to copy in visual mode,
press "a to operate on the buffer a with the next command and
yank it as usual (y).
To add to that buffer:
mark the next section and
press "A (capitalizing the buffer name means "do not overwrite the buffer, append to it instead")
and yank again using y.
You can then paste the accumulated buffer a at any time using "ap.
You have to install the multiselect plugin to get this capability. Find it here: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=953
A more up-to-date answer is this plugin.
(disclaimer: I personally don't actually use it, it interferes too much with the rest of my vim setup. If your vim is relatively clean and you are moving over from sublime, this may certainly be your cup of tea.)
I would also like to point out the record/replay functionality of vim (the q key). Quite often recording is also unnecessary, I can do the tasks normally done with sublime's multi-select by doing it iteratively (e.g. search for something, perform the fix on the first instance of it, and then subsequent repeats are achieved by hitting n and N to move around and . to repeat the edit operation).
I do have my , comma key nnoremap'd to #q, this repeats the sequence that is recorded by pressing qq (record into q register).