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I know I can set user-defined commands using the :command Foo bar syntax, but I want a way to set a command without using capitals.
For example, to save all open buffers, the command is :wa, but that's slightly too inconvenient. I'd really like to be able to just do :ww.
What's with this seemingly arbitrary limitation? Why do I have to use capital letters?
Commands (custom as well as built-in) are used in mappings, scripts, plugins. If you could override them, it would be very easy to break functionality.
There is a mechanism for customization that doesn't suffer from this (command-line mode abbreviations); unfortunately, they don't differentiate (between commands and arguments, or commands and searches), so they are too coarse, especially for short tweaks (like :W → :w). Try that:
:Alias ww wa
The cmdalias.vim - Create aliases for Vim commands plugin attempts to solve this problem, by defining mappings that only apply in command positions.
:AlterCommand ww wain the actual vim instance and have it work, but I can't add it to my .vimrc properly. I've triedAlterCommand ww wa:AlterCommand ww waand a few variations of that. I'm not even sure what to Google for this? What are these "commands" called that have colons before them? And how do I add them to my vimrc?AlterCommandin yourvimrc, you will need to place this command somewhere above (still in yourvimrc):call altercmd#load(). It's documented in the plugin's help. BTW, the whole plugin is a convenient interface around Vim's builtincnoreabbrevcommand. Also those "commands" with colons before them are called ... Vim commands (and they are run from "command-line mode").:h altercmd,:h cnoreabbrevand so on.