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As the title says. Is it possible?
Type in sample(text) and put the cursor on the first character then press w.
Cursor moves to beginning of next word - text
The cursor moves to the first brace.
The Same thing occurs when there is for example aaa * bbb - cursor moves to * first.
I tried manipulating iskeyword but without success.
Is there a way to tell Vim to ignore those operator and braces characters?
Is it possible?
Anything is possible with some scripting:
nnoremap <silent> <leader>w :call search('\<\w', 'W')<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>e :call search('\w\>', 'W')<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>b :call search('\<\w', 'bW')<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>gE :call search('\w\>', 'bW')<cr>
It's not possible to change this behavior with iskeyword, however. Here's what :h word says:
A word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, or a sequence of other non-blank characters, separated with white space (spaces, tabs, ). This can be changed with the 'iskeyword' option. An empty line is also considered to be a word.
That is, a word motion is an alternating keyword or non-keyword sequence, that may be separated by whitespace. A word motion should not be confused with a word pattern (\w which only includes 0-9A-Za-z_).
This illustrates where the cursor jumps when you press w:
sample(text) { body }
^ ^^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Setting iskeyword+=( would give you these cursor jump positions:
sample(text) { body }
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
This is because sample(text is now considered a keyword.
This can be made clearer by using iskeyword=x to simplify your notion of a word motion:
xxxx xxxx xxabcxx def hijxxxlmn
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
I understand the frustration, though there are other ways around it which might be better to use since you could find yourself using vim on a server or other environment that doesn't have your customized command changes (and accompanying muscle memory).
In your specific example, you could do f t to jump directly to the start of text.
