Tip #329: A map for swapping words

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created:		September 20, 2002 9:27		complexity:		intermediate
author:		Chip Campbell, Arun Easi, Benji Fisher		as of Vim:		6.0

Put the following map into your <.vimrc>: nmap <silent> gw "_yiw:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1/<cr><c-o><c-l> Then when you put the cursor on or in a word, press "gw", and the word will be swapped with the next word. The words may even be separated by punctuation (such as "abc = def"). While we're talking swapping, here's a map for swapping characters: nmap <silent> gc xph This hint was formed in a collaboration between Chip Campbell - Arun Easi - Benji Fisher

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Additional Notes

[email protected], September 20, 2002 11:08

Thought I'd mention some of the reasoning behind the gw-map above. Sequences such as dawelp suffer from one or more problems: * fencepost problems: they don't work correctly either at the beginning of a line or at the end of a line * single-character-word problems: mappings using b, e, or variants don't handle single-character words properly.

jean upfrontsystems co za, October 5, 2002 11:03

Looks like this doesn't swap "this" and "that" when line 2 starts with "that", and line 1 ends on "this"; that is a problem for another day :) Just possibly Vim's newline-matching regexps will be able to cope with this .. but it's probably going too far.

[email protected], December 2, 2002 7:42

Making vim handle word swapping across a newline is fairly straightforward: nmap <silent> gw "_yiw:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\_W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1/<cr><c-o><c-l> Just one extra underscore (at a suitable location, of course :) .




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