“Extending Vim to better support typographic (‘curly’) quote characters.”
This project replaces the now-deprecated vim-quotable
While Vim is renown for its text manipulation capabilities, it nevertheless retains a bias towards ASCII that stretches back to its vi roots on Unix. This can limit Vim’s appeal for those who prefer typographic characters like “curly quotes” over ASCII "straight quotes" in the prose and documentation they write.
Core features of this plugin:
- Text object supporting “typographic quotes”, incl. motion commands
- Implemented with regular expressions via the kana/vim-textobj-user plugin
- Supports quoted strings containing contractions (”don’t”, e.g.)
- Configurable to support international variations in quotation marks
Includes four additional features:
- educate - automatic entry of ‘typographic quotes’ from the 'straight quote' keys
- replace - transform quotes from straight to typographic, and visa versa
- matchit -
%
matching for typographic quote pairs - surround - surround a word or visual selection with quotes
Requires a recent version of Vim compiled with Unicode support.
Install using Pathogen, Vundle, Neobundle, or your favorite Vim package manager.
This plugin has an essential dependency that you will need to install:
- kana/vim-textobject-user - a Vim plugin to create your own text objects without pain
Because you won't want typographic quotes in your code, the behavior of
this plugin can be configured per file type. For example, to enable
typographic quote support in markdown
and textile
files, place in your
.vimrc
:
set nocompatible
filetype plugin indent on " may already be in your .vimrc
augroup textobj_quote
autocmd!
autocmd FileType markdown call textobj#quote#init()
autocmd FileType textile call textobj#quote#init()
autocmd FileType text call textobj#quote#init({'educate': 0})
augroup END
The last statement initializes the plugin for buffers of text
file type, but
disables the ‘educate’ feature by default. More on that below.
Motion commands on text objects are a powerful feature of Vim.
By default, for motion commands, q
denotes an operation on “double”
quotes and Q
denotes an operation on ‘single’ quotes. For example, with
the c
change operator:
caq
- change around “double” quotes - includes quote charsciq
- change inside “double” quotes - excludes quote charscaQ
- change around ‘single’ quotes - includes quote charsciQ
- change inside ‘single’ quotes - excludes quote chars
Apart from c
for change, you can v
for visual selection, d
for
deletion, y
for yanking to clipboard, etc. Note that count isn’t
supported at present (due to limitations of the underlying
vim-textobj-user) but repeat with .
does work.
quote’s motion command is smart too, able to distinguish between an
apostrophe and single closing quote, even though both are represented by
the same glyph. For example, try out viQ
on the following sentence:
‘Really, I’d rather not relive the ’70s,’ said zombie Elvis.
You can change these key mappings from their defaults in your .vimrc
:
let g:textobj#quote#doubleMotion = 'q'
let g:textobj#quote#singleMotion = 'Q'
The four additional features of this plugin include: educate, matchit, replace, and surround.
This plugin will ‘educate’ quotes, meaning that it will dynamically
transform straight quote key presses ("
or '
) into corresponding
typographic quote characters.
For example, entering the following sentence without this plugin using the straight quote keys:
"It's Dr. Evil. I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical
School to be called 'mister,' thank you very much."
As expected all the quotes are straight ones. But with this plugin, the straight quotes are transformed into the typographic equivalent as you type:
”It’s Dr. Evil. I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical
School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”
You can configure the educate feature in your .vimrc
:
let g:textobj#quote#educate = 1 " 0=disable, 1=enable (def)
You can enable (or toggle) the educating behavior with the following commands:
Educate
NoEducate
ToggleEducate
In some cases, straight (ASCII) quotes are needed, such as:
“print "Hello World!"” is a simple program you can write in Python.
To insert a straight quote while educating, enter «Ctrl-V»
before the quote key:
«Ctrl-V» "
- straight double quote«Ctrl-V» '
- straight single quote
Note that for units of measurement you’ll want to use the prime symbol rather than straight quotes, as in:
Standing at 7′3″ (2.21 m), Hasheem Thabeet of the Oklahoma City Thunder
is the tallest player in the NBA.
matchit enables jumping to matching typographic quotes.
%
- jump to the matching typographic (curly) quote character
You can configure this feature in your .vimrc
:
let g:textobj#quote#matchit = 1 " 0=disable, 1=enable (def)
You can replace straight quotes in existing text with curly quotes, and
visa versa. Add key mappings of your choice to your .vimrc
:
map <silent> <leader>qc <Plug>ReplaceWithCurly
map <silent> <leader>qs <Plug>ReplaceWithStraight
Both Normal and Visual modes are supported by this feature.
To transform all quotes in a document, use Visual mode to select all the text in the document.
This feature supports basic surround capabilities. Add to your .vimrc
key
mappings of your choice:
" NOTE: be sure to remove/change these mappings if using the tpope/vim-surround plugin!
map <silent> Sq <Plug>SurroundWithDouble
map <silent> SQ <Plug>SurroundWithSingle
Then you can use motion commands to surround your text with quotes:
(an asterisk is used to denote the cursor position)
visSq
- My senten*ce. => “My sentence.”visSQ
- My senten*ce. => ‘My sentence.’
Sometimes you must enter special characters (like typographic quotes) manually, such as in a search expression. You can do so through Vim’s digraphs or via your operating system’s keyboard shortcuts.
Glyph | Vim Digraph | OS X | Description |
---|---|---|---|
‘ |
'6 |
Opt-] |
left single quotation mark |
’ |
'9 |
Shift-Opt-] |
right single quotation mark |
“ |
"6 |
Opt-[ |
left double quotation mark |
” |
"9 |
Shift-Opt-[ |
right double quotation mark |
‚ |
.9 |
single low-9 quote | |
„ |
:9 |
Shift-Opt-w |
double low-9 quote |
‹ |
1< |
Opt-\ |
left pointing single quotation mark |
› |
1> |
Shift-Opt-\ |
right pointing single quotation mark |
« |
<< |
Opt-\ |
left pointing double quotation mark |
» |
>> |
Shift-Opt-\ |
right pointing double quotation mark |
′ |
1' |
single prime | |
″ |
2' |
double prime | |
– |
-N |
Opt-hyphen |
en dash |
— |
-M |
Shift-Opt-hyphen |
em dash |
… |
.. |
Opt-; |
horizontal ellipsis |
|
NS |
non-breaking space | |
ï |
i: |
Opt-U i |
lowercase i, umlaut |
æ |
ae |
Opt-' |
lowercase ae |
For example, to enter left double quotation mark “
, precede the digraph code
"6
with Ctrl-K
, like
«Ctrl-K» "6
Alternatively, if you’re on OS X, you can use Opt-[
to enter this
character.
For more details, see:
:help digraphs
Many international keyboards feature keys to allow you to input typographic quote characters directly. In such cases, you won’t need to change the behavior of the straight quote keys.
But if you do, you can override the defaults. For example, those users editing most of their prose in German could change those defaults to:
let g:textobj#quote#doubleDefault = '„“' " „doppel“
let g:textobj#quote#singleDefault = '‚‘' " ‚einzel‘
Or on a file type initialization...
augroup textobj_quote
autocmd!
autocmd FileType markdown call textobj#quote#init({ 'double':'„“', 'single':'‚‘' })
...
augroup END
Or in a key mapping...
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qd :call textobj#quote#init({ 'double':'„“', 'single':'‚‘' })<cr>
If you find this plugin useful, check out these others by @reedes:
- vim-colors-pencil - color scheme for Vim inspired by IA Writer
- vim-lexical - building on Vim’s spell-check and thesaurus/dictionary completion
- vim-litecorrect - lightweight auto-correction for Vim
- vim-pencil - rethinking Vim as a tool for writers
- vim-textobj-sentence - improving on Vim's native sentence motion command
- vim-thematic - modify Vim’s appearance to suit your task and environment
- vim-wheel - screen-anchored cursor movement for Vim
- vim-wordy - uncovering usage problems in writing
If you’ve spotted a problem or have an idea on improving this plugin, please post it to the github project issue page.
Needs better integration with existing surround plugins.