Plugin spotlight – unimpaired

Tim Pope's vim-unimpaired is a plugin that adds a number of handy mappings for existing Vim commands (and a few new ones). I use it daily, as I find mappings more intuitive—]b and [b cycle through open buffers, ]f and [f cycle through files in a directory, and so on. It's available from GitHub at https://github.com/tpope/vim-unimpaired (see the Installing plugins section earlier in this chapter for installation instructions).

Here are some of the mappings vim-unimpaired provides:

  • ]b and [b cycle through buffers

  • ]f and [f cycle through files in the same directory as the current buffer

  • ]l and [l cycle through the location list (see the Location List section in Chapter 5Build, Test, and Execute)

  • ]q and [q cycle through the quickfix list (see the Quickfix list section in Chapter 5Build, Test, and Execute)

  • ]t and [t cycle through tags (see the Meet Exuberant Ctags section in Chapter 4, Understanding the Text)

The plugin also allows you to toggle certain options with just a few key presses, such as yos to toggle spell checking or yoc to toggle the cursor line highlighting.

See :help unimpaired for a full list of mappings and features that vim-unimpaired provides.