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created 2006 · complexity basic · author Gert Vierman · version 5.7


To avoid the extra 'shift' keypress when typing the colon to go to cmdline mode, I mapped the semicolon key to do the same thing.

:nmap ; :

This overwrites the original mapping of repeating the last f or t command.

Comments[]

You can do the following to regain the functionality of ;

nnoremap ; :
nnoremap : ;
vnoremap ; :
vnoremap : ;

I use the following instead:

map ; :

This takes over the ; even in visual mode (why should I be forced to hold the shift down there but not in normal mode?). Furthermore, sometimes I want to run a custom command that starts with a capital letter, so I might have the shift already held down when I hit the ; (making it a colon), which would cause problems if the colon were mapped back to the semicolon. I get around this by this mapping:

noremap ;; ;

So, to get the original ; behaviour, I just hit it twice.

As a rule, I don't get encumbered by the timeout delay caused by the ambiguous mapping because I hit another character immediately after ; when it's a command I'm trying to execute from the command-line. The delay is only a problem if I hit the ; and hit nothing else after it. If I hit ;s, for example (the start of :sp), there is no delay.

Caveats[]

When you run a command like :ls that leaves output on the screen while waiting for you to enter another command, using semi-colon instead of colon will cause the output of :ls to be hidden as soon as you start entering the new command. There may be a fix for this, but I haven't found one yet.

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