Vim Visual Mode cursor movement that ignores underlying whitespace

Question

Is there a mode, or alternatively, is it possible to configure vim/nvim to allow the cursor to be placed at any location regardless of if said location has whitespace, text, or nothing at all ?

Analogy here would be that this mode I'm suggesting is like a paint canvas where you can click or use visual mode to type hjkl anywhere on the 'canvas' (the document).

It wouldn't modify unless you type there of course, in which case the extra whitespace would have to be added to meet your cursor ie- if in Visual Mode you navigated to the top right of your document and then hit Insert Mode its at that moment I assume the plugin or hack here would have to do some magic to edit the document whitespace to fill in the gap from nearest existing whitespace to where your cursor is.

mattb · Accepted Answer · 2022-06-13 20:32:04Z

1

See :help 'virtualedit' and section 25.5 'Editing tables' in :help usr_25.txt

You can put this in your .vimrc:

" allow cursor to be positioned where there are no chars
set virtualedit=all

edited Jun 13, 2022 at 20:32

answered Jun 13, 2022 at 20:26

mattb

3,1222 gold badges11 silver badges25 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

Derrick Over a year ago

one nitpick however, it seems you can only get this behavior via virtualedit to apply to =all or =block or =insert but not =normal I primarily would like it in normal mode, but not in insert mode.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Vim Visual Mode cursor movement that ignores underlying whitespace

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related