Can I make the indent commands take an additional count that doesn't affect the motion?

Question

Let's say I'd like to indent the current line 4 times. (Not 4 spaces, 4 indent commands). As far as I can tell, the shortest way to do this is

>>...

(Indent once, repeat three times) This seems really inefficient to me. I'd rather do something like this:

4>>

But instead of repeatedly indenting the current line, this indents the next 4 lines 1 time. In my mind, this is a total waste, because if the count before the operator was "indent level", and the count after is for a repeated motion, this doesn't lose any ability. If I wanted to indent the next four lines one time, I could just do

>4>

or even

>3j

If the first count were to work this way, you could even do a command like this:

2>4>

And this would mean "Two times, indent the following four lines". Instead it means "One time, indent eight lines".

Can I configure vim to behave this way?

Answer 1

You can do:

:>>>>

to shift the current line 4 times.

So you could write a custom normal mode mapping that shifts the current line {count} times:

nnoremap <expr> <F5> ":\<C-u>" . repeat(">", v:count1) . "\<CR>"
nnoremap <expr> <F6> ":\<C-u>" . repeat("<", v:count1) . "\<CR>"

and its visual mode counterpart:

xnoremap <expr> <F5> ":" . repeat(">", v:count1) . "\<CR>"
xnoremap <expr> <F6> ":" . repeat("<", v:count1) . "\<CR>"

Mixing {count} and {range} may be a bit more complicated.

Answer 2

alternate using visual mode:

V4>

Or just

v4>

as mentioned in the SO thread How do I indent a single line multiple times in vi or vim?

For multiple lines, for example - current line and 3 lines down, indent twice:

v3j2>