Making precise jumps around the screen is easy with a mouse but harder with vim's default movement commands. Perhaps your device lacks a pointer, or perhaps mousing ruins your flow. In this case we can do direct jumps by labeling the text. For example,

Is this the real life or is this just fantasy? becomes

0s 1his 2he 3eal 4ife 5r 6s 7his 8ust 9antasy?

and typing "9" would jump to "fantasy".

In the following:

• The LABELS list can be modified, but labels are limited to a single character.
• The labeling repeats. To remedy this there are two prompts: the first for the label, the second for which cycle (1,2,3,etc.). The screen is redrawn with the cycle number before the second prompt. So, for example, "K2" jumps to the second occurrence of K.
• A mapping to "K" (which defaults to man lookup) is included, and is set to label the first 248 words.

Place this in your vimrc:

let LABEL = ["a","b","c",
\"d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s",
\"t","u","v","w","x","y","z","A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I",
\"J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y",
\"Z","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","0"]
function! GoTo(range)
    normal! Hmt
    for i in range(0,a:range)
        exe 'normal! Wr' . g:LABEL[i%len(g:LABEL)]
    endfor
    normal! 'tzt
    echo "Index?"
    redraw
    let label=nr2char(getchar())
    normal! u'tzt
    for i in range(0,a:range)
        exe 'normal! Wr' . (1+i/len(g:LABEL))
    endfor
    normal! 'tzt
    echo "Number?"
    redraw
    let offset=getchar()
    let offset=(49 <= offset && offset <= 57) ? offset-48 : 1
    normal! u'tzt
    let index=index(g:LABEL,label)
    exe 'normal! ' . ((offset-1)*len(g:LABEL)+index+1) . 'W'
endfu
nnoremap <TAB> :call GoTo(248)<CR>

Related pluginsEdit

• The EasyMotion plugin provides exactly this functionality and more.

CommentsEdit