Making inserting a single character in Vim an atomic operation

Question

I've long used this very useful shortcut in vim:

nmap <space> i <esc>r

this means that if I press spacef, for example, it will insert a single character f at the given position.

unfortunately, however, this is not atomic, ie, if I press spacef and then navigate somewhere else, then press ., I get the equivalent of rf, not spacef.

all this makes sense, but here's the question: is there a way of making this atomic, so that . will repeat the 'insert character' operation, and so that undo etc all treat it as one operation, too?

Answer 1

Awesome! Michael's answer pointed me to the plugin I needed to finish my plugin, which can now do what you want - I had been trying to figure out how to do this for ages!

1) Install Tim Pope's plugin

2) Install my plugin

3) Add a mapping to your .vimrc:

nnoremap <space> :<C-U>call InsertChar#insert(v:count1)<CR>

Answer 2

Does this work for you?

noremap <silent> <space> :exe "normal i".nr2char(getchar())<CR>