vim-conjoin

Remove continuation characters and merge string literals when joining lines in vim.

conjoin is a Vim plugin that handles line joining in the presence of line continuation characters. Vim's normal behavior for J and :join on the following shell script:

  cat file.txt \
    | sort \
    | uniq -c

leaves the backslash continuation characters in place:

cat file.txt \ | sort \ | uniq -c

With conjoin, running join commands on the same script will produce

cat file.txt | sort | uniq -c

Long string literals are often broken up in a similar way:

print('Lorem '
      'ipsum '
      'dolor ' +
      'sic '
      + 'amet')

which would normally join to

print('Lorem ' 'ipsum ' 'dolor ' + 'sic ' + 'amet')

With conjoin, 5J will cause the literal string will be merged as

print('Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet')

Note that vim already removes leading comment characters when joining lines in a block comment with set formatoptions+=j.

Installation

Use your favorite plugin manager, e.g.

" vim-plug:
Plug 'flwyd/vim-conjoin'
" Vundle:
Plugin 'flwyd/vim-conjoin'
" vim-addon-manager:
VAMActivate github:flwyd/vim-conjoin

or git clone https://github.com/flwyd/vim-conjoin and set runtimepath+=/path/to/vim-conjoin in your .vimrc.

or as a vim8 package:

mkdir -p ~/vim/pack/conjoin/start
cd ~/vim/pack/conjoin/start
git clone https://github.com/flwyd/vim-conjoin

Mappings

By default conjoin will create normal and visual mode mappings for J and gJ and create a :Join command. If those keys are already mapped, e.g. by splitjoin, then conjoin will call the prior mapping after removing continuation characters. To get this behavior, ensure the plugin defining the other mapping is before conjoin in runtimepath, e.g.

Plug 'AndrewRadev/splitjoin.vim'
Plug 'flwyd/vim-conjoin'

If you would prefer different mappings for conjoin behavior, define them in your .vimrc:

let g:conjoin_map_J = '<Leader>z'
let g:conjoin_map_gJ = '<Leader>x'

The J and gJ mappings are repeatable with . if (vim-repeat)[https://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat] is installed. Repeat does not currently work with alternate mappings and delegated mappings.

Filetype support

conjoin currently supports line continuation patterns for the following types:

applescript
autoit
bash
c
cobra
context
cpp
csh
fortran
m4
make
mma
plaintex
ps1
python
ruby
sh
tcl
tcsh
tex
texmf
vb
vim
vroom
zsh

conjoin supports string literal merging for the following types:

ada
applescript
c
cobol
cobra
cpp
cs
d
dart
elixir
erlang
fortran
go
haskell
java
javascript
julia
kotlin
lua
mma
pascal
perl
php
ps1
python
raku
ruby
rust
scala
swift
typescript
vb
vhdl
vim

You can add support for your own filetypes in your .vimrc:

if !exists('g:conjoin_filetypes')
  let g:conjoin_filetypes = {}
endif
g:conjoin_filetypes.intercal = {'leading': '^\s*PLEASE', 'trailing': '\\$'}
g:conjoin_filetypes.lolcode = {'quote': [['\s*MKAY?\s*$', '^\s*SMOOSH']]}
" Or use a literal-Dict in Vim 8.1.1705+
" g:conjoin_filetypes.intercal = #{leading: '^\s*PLEASE', trailing: '\\$'}

Run :help conjoin-config for more details.

License and Contributing

Pull requests to add line continuation support for additional filetypes are welcome, but please read the contributing document first.