Ultra-Magic Regexps

Friendship is magic!

Wat iz?

Vim supports magic, non-magic, very-magic and very-non-magic regexps. This plugins provides a fifth mode, ultra-magic. Everything becomes magic, including letters and numbers.

Ultra-magic patterns are called ponyregs.

Setup (optional)

noremap <silent> <Leader>F :<C-u>call ponyreg#Search()<cr>

Usage

Use the mapping above, or hit <C-x>/ after entering a ponyreg.
This works on cmdline and / or ? searches.
Hit <C-x>u to undo expansion.

What's "ultra-magic"?

• Everything is magic -- punctuation, letters, digits
• Eg. w+, d*
• Strings must be escaped with double quotes eg. "foobar", or each char must be escaped individually eg. \f\o\o\b\a\r
• Strings also define a group; "ab"+ will match ab, abab, ababab etc.
• Digits are turned into curly-multi ie. w3 means \w\{3}, and d2,4 is \d\{2,4}
• Minus (-) is the non-greedy version of *, so "begin".-"end" will only match the block with 'foo' in begin foo end begin bar end
• zs/ze are turned into their special meaning.
• Capture groups can be recalled (inside the pattern) with dollar instead of backslash eg. $1, $2 etc.
• **, ++ and -- mean \(.*\), \(.+\) and \(.\{-}\), so you can match "func("--")" to get all func args in \2
• ***, +++ and --- mean \(\_.*\), \(\_.+\) and \(\_.\{-}\), so you can match "begin"---"end" to get all lines between 'begin' and 'end'

Advanced

If there are several patterns on the cmdline, eg. :g/d3s+w/s/"."d/./, the <C-x>/ will expand the first pattern (that of :global), and you will be left with the second one (that of :s). In that case, you can move cursor on the closing pattern / char (here, the / just after the d) and hit <C-x>/. The expansion will search backward for the opening /, and expand what's between. No slash can appear inside the pattern to expand.

You can define the g:pony_delim option to use another single-byte char as a delimiter, instead of /.

Quality

• POC
• Alpha
• WIP
• No warranty
• Use at own risk
• Rainbow hazard

Todo

• Much more checking
• Commands for ponyreg-friendly :s or :g?
• More non-greedy syntax?
• Support for @123<=
• Support for POSIX named character classes eg. [[:space:]]

Licence

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Int.