How can I make vim stop splitting my words into chunks?

Question

English language users probably don't have this trouble, but vim is pretty dumb when it comes to regular expressions. In my case most letters in the Turkish alphabet outside the EN alphabet don't seem to qualify as word characters.

Given a document that contains a Turkish word:

gerçekleşiyor

The search expression

/ger\wek

…will not match the start of the word. For whatever reason ç is not a word character.

This becomes maddening when plugins use \w as part of their regular expression repertoire. A case in point is neocompcache (which I use instead of neocomplete because it in compatible with Neovim). Baring extra matching rule sets for some language syntax, autocomplete only happens in word sized chunks. When I'm writing large amounts of Turkish prose it would actually be handy to have functional autocomplete, but with most words being broken into smaller chunks with the Turkish characters left out it is beyond useless.

How can I convince vim (preferably neovim if it matters) to accept a larger range of characters as "word" characters?

Answer 1

\w is explicitly short-hand for [0-9A-Za-z_]. Use \k instead if you want to match Unicode characters outside of that range. For example, /ger\kek matches gerçekleşiyor.

By the way, neocomplete is aware of this but intentionally does not use \k (by default) because of performance concerns. You can change neocomplete's g:neocomplete#keyword_patterns setting. See also:

https://github.com/Shougo/neocomplete.vim/issues/207

Answer 2

Looks like there's not an easy way to redefine \w. See, for example, Vim regex matches unicode characters are as non-word and Match word containing characters beyond a-zA-Z.

However, you might be able to use a custom range if you don't mind retyping it regularly (ha): [a-zA-Z\%u00c7-\%u015f]. That will unfortunately match lots of non-Turkish characters as well, but if those characters don't appear in your text, that might be OK.