CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vim
Petr Skocik
Petr Skocik

Reputation: 60058

How do I make vim treat $ as an identifier character?

I'd like to have vim (after pressing Ctrl+]) look up tags containing special characters like $ or @. I can do it with the :tag command (e.g., tag $some$symbol) but it doesn't work with Ctrl+]. How can I configure what vim treats as an identifier?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 226

Answers (1)

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172540

Looking at :help CTRL-], it says:

CTRL-]              Jump to the definition of the keyword under the
                    cursor.  Same as ":tag {name}", where {name} is the
                    keyword under or after cursor.

From there, one might find :help 'iskeyword', or end up with :help word, which explains:

A word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, or a sequence of other non-blank characters, separated with white space (spaces, tabs, ). This can be changed with the 'iskeyword' option. An empty line is also considered to be a word.

Therefore, you need to add $ to the 'iskeyword' option:

:setlocal iskeyword+=$

Making that permanent

The 'iskeyword' option is local to buffer, and many syntax scripts rely on correct settings for highlighting. Therefore, it's not recommended to change this globally for all filetypes (with :set, in your ~/.vimrc).

Instead, you should identify the (few) filetype(s) were you need this, and then define this only locally.

Put the corresponding :setlocal command into ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/{filetype}.vim, where {filetype} is the actual filetype (e.g. java). (This requires that you have :filetype plugin on; use of the after directory allows you to override any default filetype settings done by $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/{filetype}.vim.)

Alternatively, you could define an :autocmd FileType {filetype} setlocal iskeyword+=$ directly in your ~/.vimrc, but this tends to become unwieldy once you have many customizations.

Upvotes: 5

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