Sunday, September 26, 2010

Re: Question on completion in vim command window

On Sun, 26 Sep 2010, Eran Borovik wrote:

> Hi Vim fanatics,
> For the last year I've taken to vim more and more, and made it my main
> working environment for programming. Although I consider myself still
> a vim novice, there is a very big improvement with my work efficiency.
> One of the basic principles that I try to maintain is that my fingers
> need to stay on keyboard all the time, and stretching my pinkies too
> much means I am doing something wrong as everything that is needed
> should be available within easy reach (e.g. use hjkl instead of arrow
> keys).
> Now, I face this issue with vim command line mode when I want to
> auto-complete. In this mode, completion works great with the up down
> keys. However, those are very far for my fingers... I tried to find
> some shortcuts and saw ctrl-p, ctrl-n. But they are not good enough as
> they simply browse the history. I saw ctrl-a, but it shows all the
> matches while I want only the next one. I am sure there is a way to
> configure it, but I just cannot find it.
> Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

You can map whatever keys you'd prefer to '<Up>' and '<Down>', if those
keys have the functionality that comes closest to what you want.

e.g., if you never use ctrl-p or ctrl-n, replace them:

" in ~/.vimrc:
cnoremap <C-p> <Up>
cnoremap <C-n> <Down>

" I like:
cnoremap <C-j> <Down>
cnoremap <C-k> <Up>

If you find yourself making frequent, minor edits to long commands, you
might also like 'q:'. (As I mentioned recently, I used to abhor the
cursed 'q:' window that would prevent my mistyped ':q' from exiting, but
now I use it daily.)

:help :cnoremap
:help q:

--
Best,
Ben

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