Turning off Ctrl-Space in Vim (Shallow Thoughts)

Turning off Ctrl-Space in Vim

One of those niggling problems that has plagued me for a long time: in the editor vim, if I'm typing along in insert mode and instead of a space I accidentally hit control-space, vim inserts a bunch of text I didn't want, then exits insert mode. Meanwhile I'm still merrily typing away, typing what are now vim comments which invariably end up deleting the last two paragraphs I typed then doing several more operations which end up erasing the undo buffer so I can't get those paragraphs back.

Ctrl-space inserts a null character (you can verify this by putting it in a file and running od -xc on it). I've done lots of googling in the past, but it's hard to google on strings like " " or even "space" or "null", and nobody I asked had a clue what this function was called (it turns out it re-inserts whatever the last inserted characters were) so I couldn't google on the function name.

Vim's help suggests that <Nul>, <Char-0>, or <C-^V > should do it. I tried them with map, vmap, cmap, and nmap, to no avail. I also tried <C-@> since that's a historical way of referring to the null character, googling found some references to that in vim, and that's how it displays if I type it in vim.

I finally found #vim on freenode, and asked there. Last night nobody knew, but this morning, p0g found the problem: I needed to use imap, not the map/vmap/cmap/nmap I'd been using.

So here, perserved for google posterity in case other people are plagued by this problem, is the answer:

imap <Nul> <Space>

For good measure, I also mapped the character to no-op in all the other modes as well:

map  <Nul> <Nop>
vmap <Nul> <Nop>
cmap <Nul> <Nop>
nmap <Nul> <Nop>

My current .vimrc.

Tags: vim, editors, tips
[ 11:24 Feb 17, 2005    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]