Strikeout text in vim?

Question

Does Vim (with or without a plugin - I don't care) support strikethrough text at all? I've found myself keeping a running list of "TO-DO's" in it, and would like to be able to "cross off" my done items, via strikethrough text.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can put this in your .vimrc

map _ a<C-V>u0336<Esc><Space>

and then the underscore character will "strikout-ize" whatever is under the cursor, analogous to how ~ (tilde) changes the case.

It works like this:

a - starts to append after the character under the cursor
<C-V>u0336 (stands for Control-V followed by u0336) - the strikout overlay combining character
<Esc> - exists append mode
<Space> - advances the cursor past the strikeout character

Vim assigns another meaning to the Underscore (_) character (see :help _) so you might want to choose another character (or sequence of multiple characters).

Answer 2

Going for a highlighting simpler solution, I would use a Vim custom syntax highlighting rule so that, for example, text marked like this:

~~ text ~~

is displayed in a different color (eg. a darker text color if you have a dark background, or as dark reversed colors). Which would be, in vimrc:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.txt   syntax match StrikeoutMatch /\~\~.*\~\~/   
hi def  StrikeoutColor   ctermbg=darkblue ctermfg=black    guibg=darkblue guifg=blue
hi link StrikeoutMatch StrikeoutColor

(where the au command is used to apply the rule to filetype .txt files only)