CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimvim-plugin
vitiral
vitiral

Reputation: 9248

Why does vim behave differently inside a function?

I am trying to get the following to work inside a function.

let pat = 'set'
:execute "normal /" . pat . "\<CR>"

However, when I run it like this (literally copy paste into vim)

:function! BSearch(pat)
   execute "normal /" . a:pat . "\<CR>"
endfunction
:call BSearch('tag')

It does a search for tag, but doesn't do any of the highlighting. "set" is still highlighted, and if I press n it goes to "set", not "tag".

I am at my wits end -- it seems that inside the function execute just behaves differently.

Please help if you know a workaround.

Great workaround in answer

I was able to write out my full command and have it work as I expected

command! -nargs=1 Ack2 execute "Ack " . <q-args> | execute "/".<q-args>

The ack.vim extension didn't highlight the terms I searched for. Since I have configured my search to use perl regular expressions (and ag uses perl regular expressions, which is what I use as my searcher), the terms are now not only highlighted, I can step through them using n like I would any normal search (except it is now across my whole project obviously).

Thanks a ton!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 71

Answers (2)

yolenoyer
yolenoyer

Reputation: 9465

Just look at this:

:h function-search-undo

Here is the whole paragraph:

The last used search pattern and the redo command "."
will not be changed by the function.  This also
implies that the effect of |:nohlsearch| is undone
when the function returns.

Maybe you can move your search into a user command, for example:

command! -nargs=1 BSearch execute "/".<q-args>

Upvotes: 1

Micah Elliott
Micah Elliott

Reputation: 10274

You don’t need normal to execute a / search. For your case, this should suffice:

function! BSearch(pat)
  execute "/" . a:pat
endfunction

Upvotes: 1

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