How to search in visual mapping?

Question

I am trying to create a text object for consecutive lower-case letters.

Here is how I am setting up the inner text object:

xnoremap in :<C-u>normal! ?[^a-z]?e+1<CR>v/[^a-z]/s-1<CR>
onoremap in :normal vin<CR>

The following shows what happens when I type vin:

[text]               some important text
[cursor]                       |
[expected selection]      ^^^^^^^^^
[actual selection]             ^^^^

I then tried the following with the same text and cursor position:

v:<C-u>normal! ?i

The cursor didn't move. I expected it to.

Searching forward doesn't work either:

v:<C-u>normal! /t

However all these work:

v:<C-u>normal! b
v:<C-u>normal! e
v:<C-u>normal! Fi
v:<C-u>normal! ft

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

This is because the <CR> in your mapping signals to the norm command to finish, not for the the ? command to finish. So when you get to the first <CR>, the command that vim runs is

normal! ?[^a-z]?e+1

And this command does not do anything. Because you don't hit enter by the time the normal command is over, nothing actually happens. So here we have a dilemma. We need to tell vim to press enter inside of the normal command, but we can't press enter (because that finishes the normal command). Here is where we use <C-v> to enter a literal carriage return.

So you need to put a <C-v> before every <CR> that is not the final <CR> in your command. This makes the following mapping:

xnoremap in :<C-u>normal! ?[^a-z]?e+1<C-v><CR>v/[^a-z]/s-1<C-v><CR><CR>
onoremap in :normal vin<CR>

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Some unrelated side notes about your approach:

1. This approach only works if you're in the middle of your object. If you're at the beginning of it, things break.

2. Using \L is equivalent to [^a-z], and is faster and more readable.