cmap macros not working as expected

Question

I have been trying to make a macro to allow me to check in/out files via the vim command line. Currently what I have which "sort of" works is this:

nmap :checkout :! cleartool checkout -nc %

As you can see there is a bit of redundancy using nmap. I was under the impression that cmap created a macro which only functioned in the command line, so I thought I could do something like this:

cmap checkout ! cleartool checkout -nc %

however this seems to be creating a recursive loop which crashes vim. Is there something I'm missing? would I want to use a different map or is my syntax wrong?

Answer 1

I guess that you want to create a new command. Like this:

:command Checkout :!cleartool checkout -nc %

This allows you to run cleartool checkout from Vim with the command :Checkout.

Note: User defined commands must start with a upper case letter.