Vim: Vertical "f" and "t"

Question

One tiny piece of functionality I find myself missing increasingly often is the ability to move vertically in a similar fashion to f and t. Usually what I want is to move to the top or bottom of a paragraph without losing my column position, and while I "could" just write a script for it, I wondered if there is any known way around this problem that you guys know of.

Example ( [ ] = current position, < > = destination ):

set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4

set <s>ofttabstop=4
set gfn=Source\ Code\ Pro:h14  
set encoding=utf-8
set [t]_Co=256      
set number        

Like a vertical fs, or t<space>.

Again, this is usually useful when working with blocks of code. Any ideas?

Answer 1

vim regex provides \%nc (n is col idx) to match only in certain column.

so without installing plugin, what you could do is :

nnoremap <leader>f :<c-u>exe line('.').'/\%'.col('.').'c'.nr2char(getchar())<cr>

in this way, you press <leader>f, then press a key, vim will search that char in the same col. next, you press n/N

If you want to have the same but search backwards, use ?.

Answer 2

The most basic way is to use forward search, /t_<CR> and backward search, ?so<CR>, ideally with set incsearch.

But there are quite a lot of plugins designed around that idea:

• EasyMotion,
• Sneak,
• Fanfingtastic,
• and a few others…