Vim: Plugins written in Perl

Vim has it's own internal scripting language called Vimscript, which is complicated and only appropriate in Vim. Most versions of Vim ship with Perl support. I taught myself how to write a simple Vim script in Perl. The following will define a Vim function named CommaToggle, that calls a perl function named comma_toggle. This will toggle spaces after commas on/off.

function! CommaToggle()
perl << EOF

# Get the current line number, and line text
my ($line_num,$column) = $curwin->Cursor();
my $line               = $curbuf->Get($line_num);

if ($line =~ /,/) {
    my $fixed = comma_toggle($line);
    $curbuf->Set($line_num,$fixed);
}

sub comma_toggle {
    my $line = shift();

    if ($line =~ /, /) {
        # Remove spaces after commas
        $line =~ s/, /,/g;
    } else {
        # Add a space after commas
        $line =~ s/,/, /g;
    }

    return $line;
}

EOF
endfunction

Other Vim/Perl commands are available from the documentation. Then you can map a key combination to call that function:

nnoremap <Leader>, :call CommaToggle()<cr>
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