Moving to matching braces

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created February 24, 2001 · complexity basic · author Yegappan · version 5.7

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The % key can be used

1. To jump to a matching opening or closing parenthesis, square bracket or a curly brace i.e. ([{}])
2. To jump to start or end of a C-style comment /* */.
3. To jump to a matching #if, #ifdef, #else, #elif, #endif C preprocessor conditionals.

To get more information about this, see :help %.

The % key can be extended to support other matching pairs by modifying the "matchpairs" option. Read :help 'matchpairs'.

Comments

Also check out Benji Fisher's matchit.vim set of functions to give '%' type toggling for a multitude of language constructs, like: if,else,elseif,endif

The matchit script is now a plugin, and is included in the macros/ directory of the standard distribution of Vim 6.x. See :help add-local-help for installation details.

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I also find very useful the following map:

noremap % v%

This way, whenever you type "%" you jump to the matching object AND you visually select all the text in between.

It's useful for indenting a C or C++ method/class: go to opening/closing {/}, hit % and then hit = That's it!

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Don't forget 'showmatch', it can reduce the need for %. I like to speed things up a bit so I also set 'matchtime'. In .vimrc:

:set showmatch
:set matchtime=3

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