With the syntax highlighting in vim, I get the handy feature where the matching paren or bracket will be highlighted when I put the cursor over it. Is it possible to do the same thing for quotes?
A:
VIM already highlights quoted text in a different color, so you can easily identify strings. Do you really need it to match quotes when the whole string is already highlighted?
Justin Ethier
2010-06-21 20:15:52
"Need"? no. "Would like"? yes.
Jed Daniels
2010-06-21 20:24:58
Fair enough, but I was trying to get at: "Why would you want to match quotes when vim already highlights the whole string for you". Can you give us a use case?
Justin Ethier
2010-06-21 20:59:13
+1
A:
The problem with quotes is that they are symmetrical. It would be very hard to determine which quotes belong with each other.
For instance: "Which \"quotes\" go with each other in this statement?"
This has been discussed on the vim mailing lists a few times, as well as in the bug trackers of a few of the auto-delimiter type plugins. In every case that I've seen, it's been decided that this is better left as is.
Randy Morris
2010-06-21 20:37:18
Vim's quote text-objects (http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/motion.html#aquote) already have the smarts to deal with that. The problem is that `searchpairpos()`, which is what the MatchParen plugin uses to highlight parens, isn't able to find matching quotes.
jamessan
2010-06-21 20:45:22
Clearly the vim folks have figured this out well enough to highlight the quoted text properly, so I can't see why it would be any harder to highlight the quote itself when the cursor is over it. And, wouldn't brackets have the same issue? E.g. `{Which \{bracket\} matches the first bracket?}`
Jed Daniels
2010-06-21 20:52:42
A:
While not eloquent, one workaround is to select everything inside of matching quotes. You can do this by using the command:
vi"
This will select everything in-between the quotes. However, you won't get proper results with nested quotes as it will match the first found ".
j0rd4n
2010-06-21 20:42:36