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alfredodeza
alfredodeza

Reputation: 5198

Vim execute in function behaving differently

I am playing around with a small Vim function that will highlight whitespace.

But the execute command is behaving differently than when its called directly.

So the function looks like this:

function! ShowWhitespace()
    execute "/\\s\\+$"
endfunction

And it is mapped as:

command! SW call ShowWhitespace()

When :SW is executed it simply searches and gets the cursor to where whitespace exists.

However, when I do this in the command line:

:exe "/\\s\\+$"

It highlights correctly the whitespace. I am also making sure that highlightsearch is always on, so this is not an issue of having it on or off.

As a side note, I need to have this in a function because I want to have other things that have not yet been added to it for flexibility (like toggling for example).

Why would this behave differently in a function than executing it directly? I've written a wealth of functions in Vim and never seen this work different.

EDIT & Solution:

So it seems Vim doesn't like having functions altering searches. As soon as a function exits the search patterns are cleared (as pointed out by :help function-search-undo.

This might look ugly but does what I was looking to do in the first place:

command! -bang Ws let orig_line = line('.') | exe ((<bang>0)?":set hls!":":set hls") | exe '/\s\+$' |  exe orig_line

Explained bit by bit:

Upvotes: 1

Views: 149

Answers (1)

Luc Hermitte
Luc Hermitte

Reputation: 32976

If you don't wish to move the cursor (and never do it), just set @/ to the correct search pattern, i.e.:

let @/ = '\s\+$'

NB: the function should have moved the cursor.

Upvotes: 2

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