IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS PROJECT IS DEPRECATED. PLEASE SWITCH TO vim-textobj-quote
“Extending Vim to better support typographic (‘curly’) quote characters.”
While Vim is renown for its text manipulation capabilities, it nevertheless retains a bias towards ASCII that stretches back to its vi roots on Unix. This can limit Vim’s appeal for those who prefer typographic characters like “curly quotes” over ASCII "straight quotes" in the prose and documentation they write.
Features of this plugin:
- Automatic entry of ‘typographic quotes’ from the 'straight quote' keys
- Motion support for typographic quote pairs
- Matchit
%matching for typographic quote pairs - User can define alternative typographic quote pairs
- Replace quotes in existing text, including entire buffer
- Support for the vim-surround plugin
Requires a recent version of Vim compiled with Unicode support.
Install using Pathogen, Vundle, Neobundle, or your favorite Vim package manager.
Strongly recommended - To support typographic quotes as text objects, the following dependency should be installed.
- kana/vim-textobject-user - a Vim plugin to create your own text objects without pain
Because you won't want typographic quotes in your code, the behavior of this
plugin can be configured per file type. For example, to enable typographic
quote support in markdown and textile files, place in your .vimrc:
" standard vim command to enable loading the plugin files
" (and their indent support) for specific file types.
" It may already be in your .vimrc!
filetype plugin indent on
augroup quotable
autocmd!
autocmd FileType markdown call quotable#init()
autocmd FileType textile call quotable#init()
autocmd FileType python call quotable#init({ 'educate': 0 })
augroup ENDThe last statement initializes the plugin for buffers of python file type, but
disables the ‘educate’ feature by default. More on that below.
This plugin will ‘educate’ quotes, meaning that it will dynamically transform
straight quote key presses (" or ') into corresponding typographic quote
characters.
For example, entering the following sentence without this plugin using the straight quote keys:
"It's Dr. Evil. I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called 'mister,'
thank you very much."
As expected all the quotes are straight ones. But with this plugin, the straight quotes are transformed into the typographic equivalent as you type:
“It’s Dr. Evil. I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’
thank you very much.”
In some cases, straight (ASCII) quotes are needed, such as:
“print "Hello World!"” is a simple program you can write in Python.
To insert a straight quote while educating, enter «Ctrl-V» before the quote key:
«Ctrl-V» "- straight double quote«Ctrl-V» '- straight single quote
Note that for units of measurement you’ll want to use the prime symbol rather than straight quotes, as in:
Standing at 7′3″ (2.21 m), Hasheem Thabeet of the Oklahoma City Thunder is the tallest
player in the NBA.
You can enable (or toggle) the educating behavior with the following commands:
QuotableEducateOn
QuotableEducateOff
QuotableEducateToggleQuotableEducateOn will map the quote keys for transformation. Or better yet,
map to keys via your .vimrc:
nmap <silent> <leader>q1 :QuotableEducateOn<cr>
nmap <silent> <leader>q0 :QuotableEducateOff<cr>
nmap <silent> <leader>qq :QuotableEducateToggle<cr>Motion commands are a powerful feature of Vim.
By default, for motion commands, q denotes “double” quotes and Q denotes
‘single’ quotes.
ciq- [Change Inside “double” quotes] - excludes quote charsciQ- [Change Inside ‘single’ quotes] - excludes quote charscaq- [Change Around “double” quotes] - includes quote charscaQ- [Change Around ‘single’ quotes] - includes quote chars
Apart from c for change, you can v for visual selection, d for deletion,
y for yanking to clipboard, etc.
Quotable’s motion command is smart too, able to distinguish between an
apostrophe and single closing quote, even though both are represented by
the same glyph. For example, try out viQ on the following sentence:
‘Really, I’d rather not relive the ’70s,’ said zombie Elvis.
If you don’t like the defaults, you can redefine these by adding the following
to your .vimrc, changing the motion characters as you desire:
let g:quotable#doubleMotion = 'q'
let g:quotable#singleMotion = 'Q'Matchit enables jumping to matching quotes.
%- jump to the matching typographic (curly) quote character
You can replace straight quotes in existing text with curly quotes, and
visa versa. Add key mappings of your choice to your .vimrc:
map <silent> <leader>qc <Plug>QuotableReplaceWithCurly
map <silent> <leader>qs <Plug>QuotableReplaceWithStraight
Both Normal and Visual modes are supported by this feature.
To transform all quotes in a document, use Visual mode to select all the text in the document.
This plugin supports basic surround capabilities. Add to your .vimrc key
mappings of your choice:
" NOTE: be sure to remove these mappings if using the tpope/vim-surround plugin!
map <silent> Sq <Plug>QuotableSurroundDouble
map <silent> SQ <Plug>QuotableSurroundSingleThen you can use motion commands to surround your text with quotes:
(an asterisk is used to denote the cursor position)
visSq- My senten*ce. => “My sentence.”visSQ- My senten*ce. => ‘My sentence.’
Alternatively, if you’ve installed Tim Pope’s vim-surround plugin you also have replace abilities on pairs of characters:
cs'q- 'Hello W*orld' => “Hello World”cs"q- "Hello W*orld" => “Hello World”cs(q- (Hello W*orld) => “Hello World”cs(Q- (Hello W*orld) => ‘Hello World’
Sometimes you must enter special characters (like typographic quotes) manually, such as in a search expression. You can do so through Vim’s digraphs or via your operating system’s keyboard shortcuts.
| Glyph | Vim Digraph | OS X | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
‘ |
'6 |
Opt-] |
left single quotation mark |
’ |
'9 |
Shift-Opt-] |
right single quotation mark |
“ |
"6 |
Opt-[ |
left double quotation mark |
” |
"9 |
Shift-Opt-[ |
right double quotation mark |
‚ |
.9 |
single low-9 quote | |
„ |
:9 |
Shift-Opt-w |
double low-9 quote |
‹ |
1< |
Opt-\ |
left pointing single quotation mark |
› |
1> |
Shift-Opt-\ |
right pointing single quotation mark |
« |
<< |
Opt-\ |
left pointing double quotation mark |
» |
>> |
Shift-Opt-\ |
right pointing double quotation mark |
′ |
1' |
single prime | |
″ |
2' |
double prime | |
– |
-N |
Opt-hyphen |
en dash |
— |
-M |
Shift-Opt-hyphen |
em dash |
… |
.. |
Opt-; |
horizontal ellipsis |
|
NS |
non-breaking space | |
ï |
i: |
Opt-U i |
lowercase i, umlaut |
æ |
ae |
Opt-' |
lowercase ae |
For example, to enter left double quotation mark “, precede the digraph code
"6 with Ctrl-K, like
«Ctrl-K» "6
Alternatively, if you’re on OS X, you can use Opt-[ to enter this
character.
For more details, see:
:help digraphs
Many international keyboards feature keys to allow you to input typographic quote characters directly. In such cases, you won’t need to change the behavior of the straight quote keys.
But if you do, a standard convention is used by default:
let g:quotable#doubleDefault = '“”' " “double”
let g:quotable#singleDefault = '‘’' " ‘single’Those users editing most of their prose in German may want to change their defaults to:
let g:quotable#doubleDefault = '„“' " „doppel“
let g:quotable#singleDefault = '‚‘' " ‚einzel‘International users who desire maximum control can switch between quote
pairings within a single buffer, adding the following key mappings to
their .vimrc:
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qd :call quotable#init()<cr> " forces defaults
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qn :call quotable#init({ 'double':'“”', 'single':'‘’' })<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qg :call quotable#init({ 'double':'„“', 'single':'‚‘' })<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qx :call quotable#init({ 'double':'„”', 'single':'‚’' })<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <leader>qf :call quotable#init({ 'double':'«»', 'single':'‹›' })<cr>If you find this plugin useful, you may want to check out these others by @reedes:
- vim-colors-pencil - color scheme for Vim inspired by IA Writer
- vim-lexical - building on Vim’s spell-check and thesaurus/dictionary completion
- vim-litecorrect - lightweight auto-correction for Vim
- vim-pencil - rethinking Vim as a tool for writers
- vim-textobj-sentence - improving on Vim's native sentence motion command
- vim-thematic - modify Vim’s appearance to suit your task and environment
- vim-wheel - screen-anchored cursor movement for Vim
- vim-wordy - uncovering usage problems in writing
If you’ve spotted a problem or have an idea on improving this plugin, please post it to the github project issue page.