How to get w word and b back to treat hyphens and underscores like spaces?

Question

I currently have this in my vimrc

set iskeyword+=-

But when I press w or b my cursor skips over hyphens. Am I misunderstanding iskeyword?

How do I get word and back commands to treat hyphens (and underscores) like spaces stopping at the word after the hyphen or underscore?

Also, set iskeyword? returns iskeyword=@,48-57,_,192-255,-,#

Answer 1

It looks like your understanding is inverted. By adding - to iskeyword, you're telling Vim that it's just a regular word character that should be skipped over by things like w or b.

Instead, you want to remove it¹:

set iskeyword-=-

Based on your posted iskeyword, that should do the trick, but it's possible that others (or future you) might have a range that includes -. You can explicitly exclude a character (or range) by prepending it with ^ when adding it (and making sure it's to the right of the range that would otherwise include it):

set iskeyword+=^-

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1) The fact that the hyphen was not the last thing in your set iskeyword? might be a hint that it was already in there, meaning your set iskeyword+=- was a noop.