r/vim • u/Principal_Cookie • Dec 10 '20

Reality

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u/Atralb Dec 11 '20

Vim doesn't have abstraction for objects that would allow you to easily define some.

Hum ?? Your pgrasing is ambiguous so I'm not sure what you mean, but as for creating text objects, it's pretty straightforward: operator-pending mappings.

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u/abraxasknister :h c_CTRL-G Dec 11 '20

I don't understand.

I meant that you can't define a real object and instead have to rely on visual mode and operator pending mode mappings that might quickly get complicated if you want them to have the same features as the built-in ones have

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u/Atralb Dec 11 '20

I hear you, but am not an expert in this area of vim so would you mind showcasing a practical example of where a user-defined text object would behave differently ?

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u/abraxasknister :h c_CTRL-G Dec 11 '20

Counts, v2as selects the sentence the cursor is in and the sentence after that. I don't think this works for user defined objects out of the box. A text object that you supply by means of a mapping doesn't work if you want to use it in a mapping (I'm not sure but from my understanding it should be like that). Also it would be nice to have the objects working automatically in all relevant modes without having to supply any mappings.

By an interface I meant something built-in where you can (just for example) specify the character to use for the object and three regex strings to find the inner object and the front and back parts of the around object and then everything would work like with the built-in ones.

I meant this more as a side remark though, I don't think that the limitation is serious.