Any way to make combining characters be separate?

[Ron Aaron]

As a followup to my previous post re delcombine , I'm looking for an option to display combining characters separately.  That is, to treat them as if they were regular characters, in order to make editing them much easier.

I can't find an option for that. I'm willing to create one, but I'm not sure where the right place to do that is.

[Bram Moolenaar]

> As a followup to my previous post re delcombine

> <https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/oUjjv92rLSg/m/mPDPszs1AgAJ> , I'm

> looking for an option to display combining characters separately. That is,
> to treat them as if they were regular characters, in order to make editing
> them much easier.
>
> I can't find an option for that. I'm willing to create one, but I'm not
> sure where the right place to do that is.

No, this currently does not exist.

What you perhaps could do is write two mappings. One would take the
text of a line and put a space in front of each combining character.
The second mapping would do the reverse.

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[Ron Aaron]

Hmm. OK, that's not as awkward as using the xxd hack. I'll try it.

[Ron Aaron]

I find that there seems to be a problem with "%s" in this regard.

Source text: "וְהָאָרֶץ, הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ"

If I search using / for \u05b8 the search fails. If I instead use Ctrl+V in insert that character, the search works.

However, using "s" and a character class I cannot find either, e.g. :s/[\u05b0-\u05c0]/ fails to find it.

This seems to be a bug in how combining characters are dealt with.

[Bram Moolenaar]

> I find that there seems to be a problem with "%s" in this regard.

What do you mean with "%s" ?

> Source text: "וְהָאָרֶץ, הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ"
>
> If I search using / for \u05b8 the search fails. If I instead use Ctrl+V in
> insert that character, the search works.
>
> However, using "s" and a character class I cannot find either, e.g.
> :s/[\u05b0-\u05c0]/ fails to find it.
>
> This seems to be a bug in how combining characters are dealt with.

Perhaps, depends on how you look at it. A search normally sees a
character plus any following combining character as one item. Therefore
a match will be tried at a base character, and the next tries at the
next base character. There is no try for a match on a composing
character. This may seem wrong when searching for a composing
character, but many items such as "." would match while they should not.

You can prepend a "." before the composing character and then somehow
handle matching the base character as well. This is a bit tricky.

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