How to create an alias for a command in Vim?

user_454176 0
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Vim is my preferred text editor when I program, and thus I always run into a particularly annoying issue.

Frequently, when I quickly need to save the buffer and continue on to some other miscellaneous task, I do the typical

:w

However, I always — what seems to be like more than 50% of the time — manage to capitalize that :w. Naturally, Vim yells at me because W is an invalid command:

E492: Not an editor command: W

My question is how can one alias colon-commands in Vim. Particularly, could you exemplify how to alias W to w.

I am aware of the process to map keys to certain commands, but that is not what I’m looking for.

command alias vim
8 Answers

I think @ZyX's answer is great, but if you're using a newer version of neovim (0.5+), you might want to define the function using lua instead. Here's one way you could do it:

function _G.abbreviate_or_noop(input, output)
  local cmdtype = vim.fn.getcmdtype()
  local cmdline = vim.fn.getcmdline()

  if (cmdtype == ":" and cmdline == input) then 
    return output
  else
    return input
  end
end

function SetupCommandAlias(input, output)
  vim.api.nvim_command("cabbrev <expr> " .. input .. " " .. "v:lua.abbreviate_or_noop('" .. input .. "', '" .. output .. "')")
end

Then, you'd drop the call from call SetupCommandAlias("pg", "postgres://") and just use the function like this: SetupCommandAlias("pg", "postgres://").

n.b. If using it from a .vim file instead of a .lua file, you'd need to prefix the function call with lua, i.e. lua SetupCommandAlias("pg", "postgres://").

user_70282160
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