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Alan Thompson
Alan Thompson

Reputation: 29958

Redefine word movement stop characters for editing Clojure code in Vim/GVim

When editing Clojure code in Vim/GVim, I frequently use the w word-motion command (and its cousin b for backwards word-motion). However, in the default Clojure configuration Vim/GVim ignores common word separator chars such as hyphen, slash, and period. The following Clojure symbol shows all three:

clojure.core/select-keys

In this case, we want the w and b word-motion commands to stop at any of the non-alphabetic characters.

How can I modify the default Vim configuration to recognize these word boundaries in Clojure?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 180

Answers (2)

artronics
artronics

Reputation: 1496

I add an answer for ideavim users since, this is the first google result.

Add this line to your .ideavimrc file:

set iskeyword=@,48-57,_,192-255,?,-,*,!,+,/,=,<,>,.,:,$

Upvotes: 2

Alan Thompson
Alan Thompson

Reputation: 29958

The answer is to use the Vim feature autocmd to modify the iskeyword setting for Clojure files. Specifically, add these lines to your ~/.vimrc file:

" Remove the period `.`, hyphen, `-`, and slash `/` as keyword chars so "word" movement will stop 
" on these chars (i.e. in a namespace like `proj.some.long.ns.name` or a symbol like `my-clojure-sym`)
" Must do one at a time for 'string lists'
autocmd BufWinEnter,BufNewFile,BufRead *.clj* set iskeyword-=.
autocmd BufWinEnter,BufNewFile,BufRead *.clj* set iskeyword-=-
autocmd BufWinEnter,BufNewFile,BufRead *.clj* set iskeyword-=/

When loading a file with the suffix .clj*, we remove the three characters period, hypthen, and slash from the iskeyword string list, so they are no longer recognized as part of a "keyword". That is, they become word-separator characters. Then, the w and b word-motion commands will stop there, as we were seeking.

Upvotes: 6

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