abolish.vim

I sat on on this plugin for 3 years before releasing it, primarily because it's so gosh darn hard to explain. It's three superficially unrelated plugins in one that share a common theme: working with variants of a word.

Abbreviation

I know how to spell separate. I know how to spell desperate. My fingers, however, have trouble distinguishing between the two, and I invariably have a 50 percent chance of typing seperate or desparate each time one of these comes up. At first, I tried abbreviations:

:iabbrev  seperate  separate
:iabbrev desparate desperate

But this falls short at the beginning of a sentence.

:iabbrev  Seperate  Separate
:iabbrev Desparate Desperate

To be really thorough, we need uppercase too!

:iabbrev  SEPERATE  SEPARATE
:iabbrev DESPARATE DESPERATE

Oh, but consider the noun form, and the adverb form!

:iabbrev  seperation  separation
:iabbrev desparation desperation
:iabbrev  seperately  separately
:iabbrev desparately desperately
:iabbrev  Seperation  separation
:iabbrev Desparation Desperation
:iabbrev  Seperately  Separately
:iabbrev Desparately Desperately
:iabbrev  SEPERATION  SEPARATION
:iabbrev DESPARATION DESPERATION
:iabbrev  SEPERATELY  SEPARATELY
:iabbrev DESPARATELY DESPERATELY

Wait, there's also separates, separated, separating, separations, separator...

Abolish.vim provides a simpler way. The following one command produces 48 abbreviations including all of the above.

:Abolish {despa,sepe}rat{e,es,ed,ing,ely,ion,ions,or}  {despe,sepa}rat{}

My current configuration has 25 Abolish commands that create hundreds of corrections my fingers refuse to learn.

Substitution

One time I had an application that with a domain model called "facilities" that needed to be renamed to "buildings". So, a simple search and replace, right?

:%s/facility/building/g

Oh, but the case variants!

:%s/Facility/Building/g
:%s/FACILITY/BUILDING/g

Wait, the plural is more than "s" so we need to get that too!

:%s/facilities/buildings/g
:%s/Facilities/Buildings/g
:%s/FACILITIES/BUILDINGS/g

Abolish.vim has your back. One command to do all six, and you can repeat it with & too!

:%Subvert/facilit{y,ies}/building{,s}/g

You can abbreviate it as :S, and it accepts the full range of flags including things like c (confirm).

There's also a variant for searching and a variant for grepping.

Coercion

Want to turn fooBar into foo_bar? Press crs (coerce to snake_case). MixedCase (crm), camelCase (crc), snake_case (crs), and UPPER_CASE (cru) are all just 3 keystrokes away. These commands support repeat.vim.

Installation

If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish.git

Once help tags have been generated, you can view the manual with :help abolish.

Contributing

See the contribution guidelines for pathogen.vim.

Self-Promotion

Like abolish.vim? Follow the repository on GitHub and vote for it on vim.org. And if you're feeling especially charitable, follow tpope on Twitter and GitHub.

DigitalLexicon / vim-abolish