Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Toggling settings in vim¶
As you can never have enough keybinding tips and vim helps to prove that, the
tip for today answers Joshua’s question from ##purplism
can you toggle settings in vim with a key?
The simple answer is yes, but how easy it is depends on what you’re trying to
toggle. We need a state to test when toggling settings, so as long as we can
query the setting toggling it is easy. For example, I have a binding in my
~/.vimrc to toggle the value of background. As I use transparent
terminals the colours used for syntax highlighting can occasionally get
a little difficult to read depending on the wallpaper I’m using, the following
function allows me to quick toggle the background setting:
" Map Shift-F12 to switch between light and dark
function! Switch_background()
if &background == "light"
set background=dark
else
set background=light
endif
endfunction
map <S-F12> :call Switch_background()<CR>
For some other commands such as toggling line numbering it can be much simpler:
map <C-F12> :set number!<CR>
For those times when we can’t easily flip the setting on and off or query state in a simple manner, the solution is to store state ourselves and test that.
We may, for example, wish to toggle a group of settings on or off at one time. While we could test one of the settings in the toggle function it can become quite brittle if we change those settings ourselves. By storing our toggle state in a variable we can test that instead. The final — totally contrived — example shows how to do that:
" Map Mod1-F12 to toggle some vim goodness
function! EditorvsNotepad()
if g:notepad == "false"
let g:notepad="true"
syntax off
set nohlsearch
set laststatus=0
else
let g:notepad="false"
syntax on
set hlsearch
set laststatus=2
endif
endfunction
let g:notepad = "false"
map <M-F12> :call EditorvsNotepad()<CR>
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