Download here. I’ve also got a plain HTML4 version for those of you still using IE6 or something.
Every hacker and his dog probably has one of these kinds of set-ups, but there’s a neat little feature in mine that I think makes it worth posting. If, for some reason, you have ever cared to examine the HTML source of my pages, you’ve probably noticed that I have a very specific way that I like to format them. I always indent nested elements to make the tag hierarchy clearly visible, and I don’t like for lines of text like the ones in this paragraph to be longer than 80 characters. The trouble is, although Vim does have a setting to automatically break lines at a certain number of characters, it doesn’t work all that well with documents that have varying levels of indentation. If you’re always wrapping at 80 characters, and you have some paragraphs indented twice, others three times, maybe even some indented four times, the actual lines of text in each of those paragraphs will have different lengths, because Vim counts the indentation as part of the line length.
This made it a real pain in the neck to format my pages how I wanted, so I
started looking for a way to have Vim do this automatically. Apparently, I am
the first person who has ever wanted to do this, because hours of web searches
yielded little. I thought I was onto something with the formatexpr
and formatprg options, but it turns out that those are very finicky
options, and a solution using those was probably going to be over my head.
Eventually, it occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was not to change
the way formatting worked, but just adjust the textwidth option
whenever the indentation level of the line I was typing on changed. Wouldn’t
you know it, Vim’s autocmd feature has events for when the cursor
moves, so I could achieve exactly the effect I wanted with the following two
lines:
let basetw = 80
autocmd cursormoved,cursormovedi *.xhtml let &textwidth = basetw + indent(line('.'))The basetw value is your desired line length, not including the
current indentation level. To calculate the appropriate textwidth
for the current line, this value is added to the indentation level, retrieved
with indent(), of the current line, retrieved with
line('.'). Also note that we have to use let
&textwidth instead of set textwidth, because
set will only accept a literal value on the right-hand side of the
assignment.
The rest of the macros are pretty standard. In general, you create a new tag
by typing a ; followed by the first two letters of the tag you want
to create. The macro will automatically place your cursor inside of the tag (or
in the case of tags like <abbr>, which always have a
title attribute, put your cursor inside of that attribute value).
Some macros may generate one or more instances of the string
<\>, which serve as markers for places to jump to. For
example, if you create a <strong> tag, a
<\> will be generated after it. This is so when you are
finished typing inside of the <strong> tag, you can easily
jump out of it again by typing the macro ;<TAB> and continue
typing as normal.
Some macros also have versions for visual mode, which can be used to wrap
already typed sections of text in a tag. For example, to add an
<em> tag to a word, you can highlight it in visual mode, then
type the ;em macro.
It still has a few rough edges, but it definitely helps me type my pages faster, and even if you don’t use the whole thing, maybe there’s some feature from it that you would like to add to your own macro set.