I have been trying to learn Vim and have been using it for 2 weeks now.
My question is how do I return the cursor immediately to the middle of the text I just typed:
I have a tendency to type:
<div>
</div>
and returning back to the content of the tag and writing its contents:
<div>
text
</div>
This also goes for functions:
function eat() {
}
before getting back to the middle of the and typing it's contents:
function eat(){
blah
}
An uppercase O, so Shift+o, inserts an empty line above the one you're currently on and puts you into insert mode where you can begin typing. It was kind of an epiphany for me when I first figured that out.
If you work a lot with html / xml tags, have a look at surround.vim
I agree with michaelmichael, O works in both of your examples above.
In general, in vi or vim, you can use "macro" to achieve this. This feature acts like a bookmark, despite its name.
ma will define a macro called 'a'.
`a will take you back to where the bookmark was defined. If you want the beginning of the line, use 'a
So, if you typed 'ma' at the appropriate spot, continued typing, then typed '`a', it would achieve the effect you're looking for.
Snipmate plugin - Completion codes
dynamics
see an example of plugin in action at the vimeo site
Related
I use vim for programming purposes and I use the snipMate utility. I'm aware of the basic snippets definition, but I'm trying to do something like the following (this doesn't work):
snippet ${1}_.
<$1 class="${2}">${3}</$1>
I think it would be easier to explain with an example. What I'm trying to do is to insert a html tag when typing a word followed by _. :
So if I type div_. and press tab, it should change to:
<div class="(position of cursor)">(position of cursor)</div>
If I type span_. and press tab, it should change to:
<span class="(position of cursor)">(position of cursor)</span>
And so on. Hope you get the idea. I'm aware that I can write a snippet for every case, but I'm trying to avoid that.
Thanks!
Make the snippet do the hard work for you:
snippet tag
<${1:div} class="${2}">${3}</$1>
You may also want to take a look at emmet-vim and surround.vim.
[Edit: after reading comments I realize that the Surround plugin is adequate for my needs after all, so I'll leave this question for purely academic purposes to gain a better understanding of vimscript's inner workings]
I'd like to make adding/deleting tags, quotes, braces, and other symmetrical text structures easier to do in Vim, and I find the surround.vim plugin a little too quirky and specialized for my needs.
What I really need is more generally a "mirrored" input mode and "mirrored" deletion mode, whereby I could visually select a block of text, then type onto or delete from both ends of the selection at once. As an example workflow, I'd like to:
select the word hello
hit some keystroke combo to enter "mirror mode"
type "
my text now says "hello"
In this example I only typed one character at each end, but it's important that in step three I could have typed many characters, not just one, for instance I should be able to type <b> to produce <b>hello<b> (I still would need to manually add the / in the closing tag, which I'm OK doing).
So is this even possible in Vim? Could someone provide a broad outline of functions that would be involved in the solution? Specifically, I don't know how to intercept text as it's being inserted and then alter the location where it appears so that it's tacked onto the beginning and ending of the selection block instead of the cursor location. And ditto for deletion.
Well, the behavior you describe is exactly what Surround does:
select the word hello
hit S
type "
my text now says "hello"
The difference with what you ask is the "live updating" or "live mirroring" which I have no idea how to do. You could probably take a look at SnipMate or UltiSnips for that part.
Let's say I have the following snippet:
snippet divt
<div id="${1:div_id}">
${2:'some text'}
</div>
So when I type divt and hit tab twice "'some text'" should be selected, and when I hit tab once more I would like "some text" to be selected (witoutht single quotes). How can I do it?
Edit 1: Thanks for your answers. Probably this example makes more sense:
snippet divt
<div ${1:id="${2:div_id}"}>
</div>
Sometimes I want a div without an id, so i need to be able to delete the id="div_id" altogether. Sometimes i'd like to have an id, so that i can change div_id part only.
I am currently on a promoting trip for UltiSnips which I am maintaning. The snippet that does precisely that looks like this for UltiSnips:
snippet divt "div" b
<div ${1:id="${2:div_id}"}>
</div>
endsnippet
UltiSnips also comes with a converter script for snipMate snippets, so switching should be painless.
SnipMate unfortunately doesn't support nested placeholders but, as per #Benoit's advice, you could use another snippet while editing the second placeholder. Be sure to bring a spinning top with you, though.
I'm not sure what you want to achieve with some text vs 'some text' — both being treated exactly the same way in this context by every html parser on earth — but I would achieve that with a simple
snippet div
<div id="${1:div_id}">
${2}
</div>
and simply typing either
some text
or
'
which would be expanded to (| is the caret)
'|'
thanks to delimitMate or any other similar plugin then
'some text'
Or maybe use surround to change
some text|
into
'some text'
by typing
<Esc>v2bS'
With Surround you can also start with
some text
select it with
v2e
or something similar and type
S'
to add the quotes then select the line with
V
and type
S<div id="div_id">
to obtain
<div id="div_id">
'some text'
</div>
or do it the other way or... someone has to write a blog post with ALL the possible ways to achieve a given task in Vim.
I would like to mimic Textmates CTRL+ALT+w, which creates a new pair of opening and closing HTML tags on the same line.
In VIM Surround I'm using CTRL+st in Edit mode for this, but it always indents and creates a new line after setting the tag, so that it looks like this (* = cursor position):
<p>
*
</p>
Is there a way to achieve this? :
<p>*</p>
I guess your problem is that the selected area is "line wise". For example, if you select a few lives with V and surround it with tags, the tags will be placed one line above and one bellow the selected lines.
You probably want to create a "character wise" selection, with v before surrounding it.
Anyway, please post the map you created, so we can help debugging this.
Update
After some clarification in the comments, I would tell you that the surround plugin is not the best option. As its name describes, it was created to deal with surrounded content. So you may need content to surround.
In your case, I recommend taking a look in HTML AutoCloseTag. This plugin closes the html tag once you type the >. It is certainly more appropriated, and uses less keystrokes than surround.
<p <--- Now when you type ">", if becomes:
<p>|</p> <--- Where "|" is the cursor.
Obviously, you will get this behavior to every tag. But that may be handy if you like it.
From normal mode, type vstp> to enter visual mode and output an opening and closing <p> tag on the same line at the current cursor position. Use a capital S to maintain the current indent level.
This doesn't place the cursor in between the tags as you describe, but neither does Textmate's CtrlW shortcut (I think you meant CTRL+Shift+w, not CTRL+ALT+w, as the latter just outputs a diamond sign.)
My answer is probably coming to late, but I'll try to help.
I had similar problem with Vimsurround plugin. Every time I select sentence (one line) using ctrl+V and try to surround it with something I get this:
{
var myVar
}
instead of this:
{ var myVar } // what I wanted
I found easy solution: From a normal mode I choose a line with vis command and then I type capital C (my vim surround mapping ) and choose brackets to surround.Then I get one line nicely surrounded.
The question title is technically mislabeled based on what the author was actually looking for, but since I was actually looking for the answer to the question asked in the title, I figure I should provide an answer to it as well.
To create a new tag surrounding an element without the automatic indentation Vim Surround uses when using a block wise selection (ie: VysS), you can instead do something like:
^ys$
This command will move your cursor to the first non-blank character of the line, issue the command that you want to utilize You Surround, and move to the end of the line. Then, simply start entering your tag.
The result is this:
<input type="email" name="email">
Could become something like this:
<li><input type="email" name="email"></li>
The command is repeatable as well with . and all the normal other Vim goodness.
Stumbled upon this question because I was wondering this as well - I believe the simplest way to do this is just:
yss<p>
(yss surrounds a line with something without indenting - see here: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/vim-plugins-surround-vim/)
You can accomplish this by selecting the relevant text object: :h text-objects
...and surrounding that instead of surrounding a Visual Line selection.
The most common example I found myself running into was when trying to surround one tag with another. In that situation, the it and at text objects are quite useful:
*v_at* *at*
at "a tag block", select [count] tag blocks, from the
[count]'th unmatched "<aaa>" backwards to the matching
"</aaa>", including the "<aaa>" and "</aaa>".
See |tag-blocks| about the details.
When used in Visual mode it is made characterwise.
*v_it* *it*
it "inner tag block", select [count] tag blocks, from the
[count]'th unmatched "<aaa>" backwards to the matching
"</aaa>", excluding the "<aaa>" and "</aaa>".
See |tag-blocks| about the details.
When used in Visual mode it is made characterwise.
For example, if you had your cursor in a paragraph and you wanted to surround it with a div on the same line, ysat<div> would accomplish that.
I'm not sure this is possible, but I'm interesting in making this happen.
Ideally, I would like to map this feature to SHIFT+CTRL+3.
I'm looking for a way to have Vim enter a comment (single line) which corresponds to the syntax of the file I'm editing. If there are multiple single-line comment styles, Vim could either automatically pick one, or give me the choice. If the single-line comment has two parts (e.g. /* and */), then pressing SHIFT+CTRL+3 the first time will start the comment, and the second time will close the comment.
Examples:
Python: #
JavaScript: //
C, C++: /* with */ or //
I know there are scripts which will insert comments for you, but I haven't seen any that will do this based on the syntax of the file.
I highly recommend NERD Commenter.
Sort of! I don't believe vim will do this out of the box, but you can install plugins that will do fairly intelligent commenting (using movement keys, visual line highlighting, etc) that are specific to the filetype being edited. You can get these plugins off of vim.org, and you should be able to make your own key mappings in your .vimrc file if you don't like the ones they come with.
tComment is pretty well regarded, and has worked for me.
I've heard that EnhCommentify might be better, but I haven't used it myself.
Seems like a similar question to this:
How to comment in vim while respecting the indent?
Use the nerd commenter plugin:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1218
See: this script which provides a function to commented a highlighted area in visual mode.
You want to start a comment in insert mode so your function would look more like:
fun CommentLines()
exe ":s#^#".g:Comment."#g"
endfun
Not quite what you're looking for, but efficient, and I suppose you know which comment to use.
(all this in command mode)
Put your cursor to the first line you want to comment. We willl then set a marker called a (valid names are a-z, single character) by typing
ma
put the cursor to the last line, then set a marker called b by typing
mb
Then comment the whole block (by searching for a newline and inserting the comment character (note the use of "#" as search delimiter because otherwise wee have to escape the "/")
:'a,'bs#^#//#
or for Python:
:'a,'bs/^/#/
To uncomment:
:'a,'bs#^//##
As we do line comments, it doesn't matter if we have other comments already in the file, they will be preserved.