This is the 6th post of my post series on nifty Nvim/Vim techniques that will make my editing experience easier.

How do we get the script names when we get the <SNR> number?#

When we use a script local function (see :h script-local) in mapping with the following form

nnoremap <leader><space> :call <SID>some_function()<cr>

Vim will replace with followed by a number and an Underscore, like this: <SNR>12_some_function(). The number is the order the script containing the function is sourced by Vim. To find the script, use the command :scriptnames, which will print the path of different scripts in the order of being sourced by Vim.

The Vim plugin scriptease provides a command :Scriptnames which will show all the sourced script and their index in a quickfix window for better inspection.

References#

• Get a script’s SNR.

Open a file and go to specific line#

When you run a source file, if something goes wrong, you may see a stack trace of error lines. You may want to jump to the specific lines in that file. If you are in command line, you can use nvim +{NUM} test.py to open file test.py and go the line NUM, for example:

# open test.py and go to 10th line
nvim +10 test.py

If you are already in Neovim and want to open a file and go to a particular line, you can use :e or :edit command:

References#

• Nvim doc: :h :edit and :h +cmd.

Repeat previous command line command#

If you have used a command, how do you repeat that command without typing it again in the command line? You can just press @: (see :h @:).

References#

• http://tilvim.com/2014/01/29/repeat-cmdline.html
• How do I repeat any command in Vim, like “C-x z” in emacs?
• The dot “.” isn’t repeating last command

Show character count for selected region#

When we select some characters in visual mode, we want to know exactly how many characters are selected. This can be achieved by pressing g followed by Ctrl-G. The info about selected texts will be print on the command line:

Selected 1 of 42 lines: 1 of 306 Words; 6 of 2015 characters; 18 of 2027 bytes

References#

• https://superuser.com/questions/289264/count-highlighted-string-length-in-vim

Open a file from pipe output in nvim#

When the output of a terminal pipe is a file name and you follow it with nvim command, nvim will interpret the filename as text and put the texts in an unnamed buffer.

If you want to open the corresponding file instead, you may use xargs:

find ~ -type f -name "init.vim" -print |xargs nvim

Or you can use the bash $ expansion like the following:

nvim $(find ~ -type f -name "init.vim" -print)

References#

• To open files in Grep’s output to Vim’s -o -mode
• How to a open a file in vim using pipe

How to confirm a wildmenu completion and go to next level?#

When we set the option wildmenu (set wildmenu), we can cycle between the completion items in the command line using Tab. For example, when we use :edit command to open files, we can use Tab to select which file to edit. But how do we confirm what we want to go to a subdirectory to do further completions?

According to the documentation of wildmenu, we can press the ↓ key to confirm a selection or go to the subdirectory if current selection is a directory. BTW, you can press ↑ key to go to parent directory. Pressing ← and → will cycle backward and forward the completion items, just like what Ctrl-P and Ctrl-N does.

References#

• Vim command line mode - how to confirm selection?
• Confirm selection among options