Is there a better way to create this "semi-strong" left motion?

Question

I'm pretty new to vimscript, and I wrote this little function to map H so that the cursor will go to the first non-whitespace character of the line, or to the beginning of the line if the cursor is already at the first non-whitespace character. I just want to a) share this for anyone who might find this useful, and b) ask if there's a more efficient way to do this. I feel like there should be some more in-built way to do this.

function! HFunc()
    let colnum1 = col(".")
    execute "normal! ^"
    let colnum2 = col(".")
    if(colnum1 == colnum2)
        execute "normal! ^0"
    endif
endfunction

nnoremap <silent>H :call HFunc()<cr>

Answer 1

It can definitely be simplified with:

nnoremap <silent><expr> H indent('.')+1 == col('.') ? '0' : '^'

<expr> causes the map execute the expression on the {rhs}.

indent('.') is the number of whitespace characters at the beginning of the line. The character right after that would be the beginning of the line ^.

To do the opposite:

nnoremap <silent><expr> L col('.') == match(getline('.'), '\S\zs\s*$') ? '$' : 'g_'

I'm not sure if there's a better way, but match(getline('.'), '\S\zs\s*$') finds the position of the last non-whitespace character.

g_ is a motion to go to the last non-whitespace character.

As for your script, you didn't really need to use the execute statements since you weren't including variables. They could've just been normal! ^ and normal! 0. Also, normal! ^0 is actually two motions: Move to the beginning of the line, then to the first column of the line. The ^ was redundant.

In any case, good job taking a stab at vim script. It's not an easy language to learn 🙂

Answer 2

Here's another solution:

noremap <silent> H :call  search('\(^\s\+\)\@<=\S\\|^', 'b', line('.'))<CR>

It's a bit convoluted but it works! :D

search() will position your cursor at a given pattern. I've given it TWO patterns separated by \| which means it will jump to the first one it finds. \(^\s\+\)\@<=\S is a pattern that looks for the first non-whitespace character. (The look behind is necessary, because otherwise we would go to the first of the line.) ^ Is a pattern looking for the beginning of the line (obviously). The 'b' is a flag telling search() to look backwards.

The one downside to this is that if you press H While on the first character of the line, it will continue searching backwards. I tried to think of how to stop this, but nothing came to mind immediately.

Edit: Fixed the multi-line problem by adding line('.') to the search command. (Duh!)