Insert character until column number

Question

I'd like to define a vim command with the following functionality.

60<F7>= insert = at the end of the line until the line become 60 characters long.

<F7>* insert * until the line becomes as long as the value of colorcolumn.

The preexisting text on the line should be separated from the inserted characters by a space.

Answer 1

Well, doing this in vimscript is not that hard. For example, the following command will do what you describe to the line your cursor is on:

:exec 'norm '.(&cc - strlen(getline('.'))).'A='

The way this works is it determines the length of the current line and subtracts that from the current value of 'colorcolumn'. This evaluates to a string, and is executed as if you had typed it. For example, on a line with 10 characters, and with 'colorcolumn' set to 80 this is equivalent to typing:

70A=

You can also be more specific about which line to do this to. For example, to do this to line 3:

:exec 'norm '.(&cc - strlen(getline(3))).'A='

Or the line that mark a is on:

:exec 'norm '.(&cc - strlen(getline("'a"))).'A='

To wrap this up in a convenient mapping, I would recommend this:

function! Append(c)
  exec 'norm '.(&cc - strlen(getline('.'))).'A'.nr2char(a:c)
endfunction

nnoremap <expr> m ':call Append('.getchar().")\<CR>"