Vim tip: opening lines without delay (Shallow Thoughts)

Vim tip: opening lines without delay

I use vim to reply to email messages in mutt. And something I do very often is to open some new lines between quoted sections. For instance, if I'm replying to mail with a section like

> Have you noticed anything weird about squirrels lately?
> I think they're plotting something.

I might want to open up space after the first line, and say

> Have you noticed anything weird about squirrels lately?

You too? One of our local squirrels ran off with my Arduino yesterday.

> I think they're plotting something.

So I need three blank lines, with the cursor on the middle line.

In vim, typically I would place the cursor on the line before the space I want to open, and type o<RETURN><ESC>O :

o

open a line below the current line

<RETURN>

make an empty line below the quoted line

<ESC>

get out of insert mode

O

open a new line above the current line and enter insert mode there

Sounds complicated, but it's pretty fast to type o<RET><ESC>O especially when you do it many times a day.

Except vim has an odd quirk: after you type that O, you have to wait a second or two. If you start typing immediately, somehow you're not in insert mode any more, and the line you just opened, and thought you were typing in, disappears.

Well, it turns out this happens because <ESC>O is a sequence that can also happen from arrow keys. So vim has a timeout it uses to figure out whether an <ESC>O sequence was from an arrow key, or two characters typed by a real person. If the O follows too soon after the <ESC>, it figures it's an arrow key. (This is discussed in more detail in this Stack Overflow thread: Vim: Delay before 'O' opens a new line?)

It turns out there's a simple solution: set the timeout much shorter, like 100 milliseconds, in .vimrc:

set ttimeoutlen=100

Then arrow keys should still work -- unless you typically use vim over a very slow connection -- but you can type the sequence yourself (unless you type very fast) and not have it confused with an arrow key.

But really, there's a better solution. Since opening up space like this is something I do so often, why not make a vim binding for it?

map <leader>o o<CR><ESC>O

Now all I have to do is type \o (backslash, \, is the "leader" character) and I get a space opened up, with a blank line both before it and after it.

Tags: editors, vim
[ 12:20 Jul 21, 2012    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]