Why doesn't "normal! lb" on last character of line move to beginning of word?

Question

Let's say I have the text:

foo bar baz

With the cursor on z, I would expect :normal! lb to move the cursor to the first letter of baz. In actual fact the cursor does not move.

However typing :normal! l and then :normal! b does move the cursor as expected.

The docs for :normal! state:

Execution stops when an error is encountered.

Is this why :normal! lb doesn't do what I expect? The l cannot move to the right and so it is treated as a (silent) error?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

As @statox notes, you've answered your own question!

As your cursor is already at the rightmost position in the line, attempting to move further to right causes an error, and the :normal! execution ends.

Note, however, that this behaviour is dependent on at least two of Vim's default options. Try either of the following commands first, and your normal command will work as you originally expected:

" This allows `l` to move down to the beginning of the next line
:set whichwrap+=l

" This allows `l` to move past the last character on the line
:set virtualedit=all

Similar behaviour can be utilised to write recursive macros that stop at the end of a line.