How to predefine the cursor position in command?

Question

I'm trying to create a custom key mapping which start bring up commandline mode with some text inserted. I would like to have the cursor position not at the end but in a specific position, like this:

:%s/|/nextposition/g

Where | represents the cursor.

It would be perfect if the cursor could be positioned to the nextposition place if user types <Tab> or some other key stroke.

How to achieve this?

Answer 1

You can use that:

nnoremap <key> :s//nextposition/g<c-b><right><right>

The mapping will first go into command mode: :

Then write s//nextposition/g in the command lines

Go to the beginning of the command <c-b>

And move to the desired position: <right>

Some interesting command line mappings can be found here: :h cmdline-editing

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Now about the part where you want to move the cursor to another place with <tab> it is something that you can do in insert mode with a snippet engine like UltiSnips but I'm not sure you can make it work in command line.

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Also not exactly related but Damian Conway has two pretty interesting mappings described in his how I vim:

First he says that to simplify his substitutions he created the following mapping:

nmap  S  :%s//g<LEFT><LEFT>

So he can press S and then just pattern/replacement to do the substitution.

Then to improve it he created the following:

nmap <expr>  M  ':%s/' . @/ . '//g<LEFT><LEFT>'

This way he can make a search /pattern, see the results and simply type M followed by the replacement string and the pattern is automatically added to the substitution command. (Note that it is convenient to see the pattern in the command but doing :%s//replacement/g will also use the last search pattern)

I know that it is not what OP is asking for but I thought it could be an inspiration source.