Lunicode

A plugin that provides a way to insert special characters that I prefer to the available options for Neovim.

Installation

Assuming you're using vim-plug or a similar tool, add the following to your plugin section:

Plug 'benwr/lunicode'

Usage

In order to use this library, you need to (for example) add the following to your init.vim:

let g:lunicode_table = {
      \'To': '→',
      \'Times': '×',
      \}

Now you should be able to use the <leader>k operator on any motion. This will search the text contained in the motion for the words "Times" and "To" (case-sensitive), and replace them with the specified characters.

From insert mode, you can use <C-k> to quickly enter a motion from the current cursor position, or <C-k><C-k> to format the current line.

This is basically how I think digraphs should work: You don't need to repeatedly press chords to get your expression translated, and there's a lot more flexibility about naming (since the words you use can be anything matching the regex [A-Z][a-z]*. The way I typically use this tool is when I'm writing, say, a type declaration in Agda. I'll write out the whole line as a sequence of CamelCaseSymbols, and when I'm done I'll press <C-k><C-k> to convert it all to unicode.

There are some obvious downsides here compared to digraphs. You need to fill in your own table from scratch, and since the words must follow the above regex, there are significantly fewer two-character codes available. But for me personally, this way of doing it is much more ergonomic than digraphs or latex-based snippets.