The other day I found myself copy-pasting some Google Docs texts into a new
Jekyll website, and so I had to format quite
a bunch of lists. After Google Docs, the reflex was to select the rows, and hit
⌘+Shift+8, so I thought: Hey why not make a key-mapping? 🤓
I’ve tried this kind of thing
before
and I new it’s hard to get the ⌘+Shift- key mappings, so I went with what I knew
worked, so I decided on Alt-8 instead.
Here is what came out:
vnoremap <buffer> ¶ :s/^\s*/\0* /g\|:nohlsearch<CR>
So it’s a visual map: it’ll work on a selection of lines. I know some Vim veterans disregard visual mode as not hard-core enough, and recommend using text objects instead, but visual mode seems to work quite well for me so far. 😉
It’s a <buffer>
mapping, so
that it’s only set for the current buffer, and it can do something else in
buffers of other types.
It’a noremap just to be safe: if any of the mapped key-strokes are mapped to
something else by some other module, I don’t want them to interfere.
The ¶ thingy is what comes out when you type Alt-7 on a Mac. ¯_ツ_¯
Of course (!) one can’t figure out the bulleted lists without also thinking
about the numbered ones, so I though Alt-8 would be a perfectly natural next
step. 🙂
Here it comes:
vnoremap <buffer> • :s/^\s*/\00 /g\|:nohlsearch\|:normal gpo^g<CR>
Neat! 🤓
* * *
P.S.: As is often the case, writing this quick article exposed a glitch in the
last key-binding, and a
hole
in my understanding of how this whole thing works: I thought I needed <C-U> at the beginning, and while checking
again the docs I found I actually don’t. Cool! 🤓