"[[" and "]]" jump to top and bottom of file instead of expected behavior

Question

I'm trying to utilize section movement via [[, ]] and friends, but I'm not seeing the behavior I'm expecting given my understanding of the documentation.

A section begins after a form-feed () in the first column and at each of a set of section macros, specified by the pairs of characters in the a set of section macros, specified by the pairs of characters in the 'sections' option. The default is "SHNHH HUnhsh", which defines a section to start at the nroff macros ".SH", ".NH", ".H", ".HU", ".nh" and ".sh".

The "]" and "[" commands stop at the '{' or '}' in the first column. This is useful to find the start or end of a function in a C program. Note that the first character of the command determines the search direction and the second character the type of brace found.

Granted, I don't understand nroff macros, so maybe that's the gap, but the second paragraph mentions moving to the next '{' or '}' character in the first column. However, when I type ]] or [[, I move to the bottom or top of the file, instead.

I tested in JS, CSS, HTML, and PHP files, and since vim's defaults are mostly for C, I tried again in a C file, but all with the same result.

Is there something I'm missing about this?

Tested in vim and nvim with -u NONE.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT:

Here's the C file (which I expect to work the best) that I'm testing against.

#include <stdio.h>
// My comment

void main() {
   void a, b;

   a = 11;
   b = 99;

   printf("Values before swapping - \n a = %d, b = %d \n\n", a, b);

   a = a + b;  // ( 11 + 99 = 110)
   b = a - b;  // ( 110 - 99 = 11)
   a = a - b;  // ( 110 - 11 = 99)

   // another comment
   printf("Values after swapping - \n a = %d, b = %d \n", a, b);
}

int yo() {
    printf("hi there");
}

Answer 1

You’re misunderstanding the motions. [[ and ]] both only move to a { character in the first column (backwards and forwards, respectively), which your file does not have. To jump to a } you need to use [] and ][.

I used to find this hard to remember until someone on this site suggested that the way to remember it is that the first bracket tells you the direction of travel and then you press it again for the start of the function or press the other bracket for the end.

Answer 2

[[ and ]] for Egyptian style of curly braces

vim help (:h section) suggests following remapping if you add the opening curly brace to the end of the function header and not on a separate line:

map [[ ?{<CR>w99[{
map ]] j0[[%/{<CR>

They are not perfect, e.g. they mess up your search history.

Btw: following ftplugins redefine [[ and ]] for you with this style of coding in mind:

• $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/rust.vim
• $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/php.vim
• https://github.com/fatih/vim-go

For c/c++ there is lh-cpp which also redefines [[ and ]]. However, it depends IMHO on too many plugins (lh-vim-lib, lh-style, lh-brackets, mu-template, lh-dev, alternate-lite).

I am still looking for a more lightweight solution. Maybe the inclusion of treesitter in neovim can help here too. Other relevant projects are:

• https://github.com/libclang-vim/libclang-vim
• https://github.com/libclang-vim/vim-textobj-clang