Vim finds incorrect matching bracket when using %

Question

I am trying to learn VIM, buy I noticed when I try using the % command to go to a matching bracket, VIM sometimes finds the correct matching bracket and is sometimes way off. Has anyone ever come across this with a solution?

Answer 1

This happens because:

1. You have an actual syntax error with a mismatched paren or curly brace somewhere.
2. You have a value in cpoptions that prevents semi-intelligent brace matching. Look up :help cpoptions and :help %.
3. You have something too sophisicated for plain old Vim matching to handle. Try installing the matchit plugin, which may help. Common culprits are braces inside comments or regexes.

Answer 2

Apparently, vim parses brackets even in comments, which was happening in my case, I had a non-complete bracket pair commented out, meaning vim did not find bracket pairs correctly but the compiler had no problem, hence my confusion.

Answer 3

matchit plugin would have saved me hours of frustration if I had found it earlier.

There's a small chance pasting this ugly command into your terminal will correctly set up the plugin:

wget http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=8196; unzip download_script.php?src_id=8196; echo >> ~/.vimrc; echo -ne "source " >> ~/.vimrc; pwd | tr -d '\n' >> ~/.vimrc; echo -ne "/plugin/matchit.vim" >> ~/.vimrc; rm download_script.php\?src_id\=8196

Then re-source your vimrc:

:source ~/.vimrc