Remaping leader with :execute cannot run two commands at once

Question

I have following command:

map <Leader>ntd :execute ":tabe! ". g:path ."l_todo.txt"<CR><ESC> :execute ":vsplit! ".g:path ."u_todo.txt"<CR>

Both tabe! and vsplit! commands works fine as separate remapings. I want to join those commands into one remaping.

How to make the above command to work?

Answer 1

You don't need to use two different execute() calls, you can simply call both commands in execute() like this:

nnoremap <Leader>ntd :execute "tabe! ". g:path . "l_todo.txt \| vsplit! " . g:path . "u_todo.txt"<CR>

Note the escaped piped character (\|) it is escaped so that vim understands that it is part of the command fed to execute.

Otherwise, when you source your vimrc, Vim would try to execute first nnoremap <Leader>ntd :execute ":tabe! ". g:path . "l_todo.txt followed by vsplit! " . g:path . "u_todo.txt"<CR> which is not what you want.

---

You could also improve the readability of your code like this:

let firstCommand="tabe! ". getcwd() . "/l_todo.txt"
let secondCommand="vsplit! " . getcwd() . "/u_todo.txt"
nnoremap <Leader>ntd :execute firstCommand . "\|" . secondCommand<CR>

Here we separate the different part of the string give to execute() to see the two actions executed.

We also use :h getcwd() to get the current working directory so that we don't need a global variable to get the path.

---

Several other points about your code:

• You don't need the : in the commands you feed to execute()
• Always use the non recurcive version of map (i.e. noremap) unless you know what you're doing
• Always specify a mode to map (see :h map-modes)