nvim-spider 🕷️🕸️

Use the w, e, b motions like a spider. Move by subwords and skip insignificant punctuation.

Lua implementation of CamelCaseMotion. Works in normal, visual, and operator-pending mode. Works with counts and is dot-repeatable.

Note
If you installed the plugin before March 31, you should change your keymappings to call the motions via Ex-commands: `"lua require('spider').motion("w")". This makes them dot-repeatable if used in operator-pending mode. See the examples here.

Features
Installation
Credits

Features

The w, e, b (and ge) motions work the same as the default ones by vim, except for two differences:

Subword Motion

The movements happen by subwords, meaning it stops at the sub-parts of a CamelCase (or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE or kebab-case) variable.

-- positions vim's `w` will move to
local myVariableName = FOO_BAR_BAZ
--    ^              ^ ^

-- positions spider's `w` will move to
local myVariableName = FOO_BAR_BAZ
--    ^ ^       ^    ^ ^   ^   ^

Skipping Insignificant Punctuation

A sequence of one or more punctuation characters is considered significant if it is surrounded by whitespace and does not include any non-punctuation characters.

foo == bar .. "baz"
--  ^      ^    significant punctuation

foo:find("a")
-- ^    ^  ^  insignificant punctuation

This speeds up the movement across the line by reducing the number of mostly unnecessary stops.

-- positions vim's `w` will move to
if foo:find("%d") and foo == bar then print("[foo] has" .. bar) end
-- ^  ^^   ^  ^^  ^   ^   ^  ^   ^    ^    ^  ^  ^ ^  ^ ^  ^  ^ ^  -> 21

-- positions spider's `w` will move to
if foo:find("%d") and foo == bar then print("[foo] has" .. bar) end
-- ^   ^      ^   ^   ^   ^  ^   ^    ^       ^    ^    ^  ^    ^  -> 14

If you prefer to use this plugin only for subword motion, you can disable this feature by setting skipInsignificantPunctuation = false in the .setup() call.

Note
vim's iskeyword option is ignored by this plugin.

Text Object

For an alternative iw text object that considers CamelCase word parts, check out the "subword" text object of nvim-various-textobjs.

Installation

-- packer
use { "chrisgrieser/nvim-spider" }

-- lazy.nvim
{ "chrisgrieser/nvim-spider", lazy = true },

No keybindings are created by default. Below are the mappings to replace the default w, e, and b motions with this plugin's version of them.

vim.keymap.set({"n", "o", "x"}, "w", "<cmd>lua require('spider').motion('w')<CR>", { desc = "Spider-w" })
vim.keymap.set({"n", "o", "x"}, "e", "<cmd>lua require('spider').motion('e')<CR>", { desc = "Spider-w" })
vim.keymap.set({"n", "o", "x"}, "b", "<cmd>lua require('spider').motion('b')<CR>", { desc = "Spider-w" })
vim.keymap.set({"n", "o", "x"}, "ge", "<cmd>lua require('spider').motion('ge')<CR>", { desc = "Spider-w" })

Note
Note that for dot-repeat to work properly, you have to call this plugin's motions as Ex-command. Calling function() require("spider").motion("w") end as third argument of the keymap do not support dot-repeatability.

Configuration

The .setup() call is optional. Currently, its only option is to disable the skipping of insignificant punctuation:

-- default value
require("spider").setup({
	skipInsignificantPunctuation = true
})

Credits

Thanks

To @vypxl and @ii14 for figuring out dot-repeatability.

About Me
In my day job, I am a sociologist studying the social mechanisms underlying the digital economy. For my PhD project, I investigate the governance of the app economy and how software ecosystems manage the tension between innovation and compatibility. If you are interested in this subject, feel free to get in touch.

Blog
I also occassionally blog about vim: Nano Tips for Vim

Profiles

Buy Me a Coffee

smjonas/nvim-spider