readline.vim

Readline is a library used for implementing line editing across many command-line tools (including Bash and other shells and interpreters). Readline ships with a default set of key-bindings that you are probably already familiar with. The Readline default bindings is a mixture of traditional Unix and Emacs bindings.

This plugins implements a subset of Readline's default keyboard commands to Vim's command-line mode. Mappings available include deletion and navigation by words and other useful stuff.

Features

What makes this plugin different from similar plugins is that it implements a larger subset of the Readline mappings, and that it does a better job of mimicking the Readline behavior for each command.

The word movement and deletion commands have different behavior between Vim and Readline. The biggest difference is that in Readline punctuation is always skipped when searching for a word boundary. Another difference is that _ (underscore) is treated as a word delimiter. This plugin implements the Readline behavior for word movement and deletion commands.

Examples

Following are a few examples illustrating when this plugin can be useful. In each example _ is used to indicate the current cursor position.

#1

Deleting last two elements of path argument to :cd.

Command line	Command
:cd path/to/dir/_	M-Backspace
:cd path/to/_	M-Backspace
:cd path/_

#2

Deleting path argument to :edit completely.

Command line	Command
:edit path/to/file_	C-w
:edit _

#3

Adding ! to :edit command.

Command line	Command
:edit path/to/file_	C-a
:_edit path/to/file	M-f
:edit_ path/to/file	!
:edit!_ path/to/file

More documentation

See the documentation for documentation of all mappings implemented by this plugin.