Unable to understand a line in .vimrc

key-bindingsvim

I do not understand what the following line does in .vimrc

nmap <silent> <leader>v :EditConfig<cr>

It seems that

nmap mean noremap
silent seems to mean apparently no beep in Vim
leader seems to mean the first character in the mode :
v seems to mean visual mode
EditConfig should be a command in vim in the mode : (However, it is not.)

What does the line mean in .vimrc?

Best Answer

nmap means "map a key sequence when in normal mode" (see vim's docs).
<silent> tells vim to show no message when this key sequence is used.
<leader> means the key sequence starts with the character assigned to variable mapleader -- a backslash, if no let mapleader = statement has executed yet at the point nmap executes.

And the v is the rest of the key sequence.

So overall this is mapping, in normal mode, a backslash-v key sequence to show no message and execute :EditConfig which is likely a function defined previously in the vimrc to edit configuration files (see for example this vimrc, search in browser for editconfig). :call EditConfig() at the end (as the vimrc file I gave the URL to uses) would be better, I believe.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Eclipse – How to duplicate a whole line in Vim

yy or Y to copy the line (mnemonic: yank)
or
dd to delete the line (Vim copies what you deleted into a clipboard-like "register", like a cut operation)

then

p to paste the copied or deleted text after the current line
or
P to paste the copied or deleted text before the current line

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Eclipse – How to duplicate a whole line in Vim

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.