Indenting and dedenting in Vim

Created , updated 2 minute read

I frequently indent or dedent text in Vim with > or <. This works in both normal and visual/select modes.

In conjunction with this, I often use . to repeat the indent (if I have a few levels of indenting to change, it feels easier to just tap . a few times and stop when you’re at the right place, rather than trying to guess the number of jumps required and type something like 4<).

I was browsing the Vim sub-reddit and saw some neat mappings in this thread, specifically:

xnoremap < <gv
xnoremap > >gv

These allow you to just mash the > or < keys repeatedly, because they maintain the visual selection after each move with gv.

I considered playing with these because sometimes with my use of . I end up going to far, and then having to reselect (gv) and apply the inverse operation (> for an excess <, or > for an excess <). On taking them for a spin, I noticed that the native . is broken, because it is effectively repeating only the last part of the mapping and not the entire thing. I’d like to preserve the functionality of . here, because muscle memory is a powerful thing and I’ve been doing this for years now.

Tim Pope’s vim-repeat to the rescue? Alas no. I started with a set-up like this:

xnoremap <silent> <Plug>DedentAndReselect <gv
      \ :silent! call repeat#set("\<Plug>DedentAndReselect")<CR>
xmap < <Plug>DedentAndReselect

Entering command mode here ends up taking us out of visual mode.

Next attempt; note that I keep the gv in the initial part of the mapping, so that it will still (kind of) work if vim-repeat is not installed:

xnoremap <silent> <Plug>DedentAndReselect >gv
      \ :silent! call repeat#set("\<Plug>IndentAndReselect")<CR>gv
xmap > <Plug>DedentAndReselect

This does indeed reselect the text, but it doesn’t repeat the dedent.

Final try:

xnoremap <silent> <Plug>DedentAndReselect <gv
      \ :silent! call repeat#set("\<Plug>DedentAndReselect \<Bar> normal gv")<CR>
xmap < <Plug>DedentAndReselect

This is the hackiest of all, trying to funnel extra keypresses through vim-repeat to achieve our ends. Alas, this doesn’t work either. I tried a few variations on this but none worked.

In the end, on revisiting the Reddit comment thread, I realized what I’d been missing all along. I can undo overshot dedents or indents with u, which is native, unconfigured Vim, with no reliance on external plug-ins.