Vim: How to change text from within an indent script

Question

I recently switched from Eclipse to Vim. I'm loving it. There are a few hangups I'm working on, but one of the ones I'm having lots of trouble with is the PHP doc comments. In eclipse I could type:

/** [enter]

and the next line would auto fill with

 * 

So I'd have:

/**
 * [comment goes here]

I'm wondering if there's anything like this for vim. It seems there are some plugins to autogenerate doc comments by running a command, but I'd love to have it do them as I'm typing.

I was playing around with the PHP indent script (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1120) and I got it to recognize when it's inside of a doc comment block, but I can't figure out how to get it to actually change the text and add a " * " after hitting enter when inside the block.

I've tried what I've seen other plugins do:

let @z = ' * '
put! z

tried this too:

exe 'normal!' '"zgp'

but no luck. Is this not possible from an indent script, and if not, how do I actually get Vim to recognize a doc comment block and act accordingly while I'm typing?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

No need to mess around with the indentation files. Vim's formatoptions will do this for you and in a variety of languages (not just PHP).

Ensure you have r included in your formatoptions:

:setlocal fo+=r "to set
:set fo? "to query

You can include this in your .vimrc or in .vim/ftplugin/php.vim (if you just want to activate this for PHP).

For more information on formatoptions and file-type plugins, see:

• :help 'formatoptions'
• :help fo-table
• :help ftplugins