[vim] Allow adding non-ASCII characters to iskeyword (#576)

Matthew Orlando

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Jan 23, 2016, 3:21:36 PM1/23/16

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Vim is not treating Unicode's For All character as alphanumeric, so I'm having trouble getting the syntax highlighting & word boundary navigation to work with jank.

Vim's documentation is very clear on this, but doesn't seem to offer any justification:

word:

A word consists of a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, or a sequence of other non-blank characters, separated with white space (spaces, tabs, ). This can be changed with the 'iskeyword' option. An empty line is also considered to be a word.

iskeyword:

Keywords are used in searching and recognizing with many commands: "w", "*", "[i", etc. It is also used for "\k" in a |pattern|. See 'isfname' for a description of the format of this option.

isfname (emphasis mine):

Multi-byte characters 256 and above are always included, only the characters up to 255 are specified with this option. For UTF-8 the characters 0xa0 to 0xff are included as well.

Besides the inability to add or remove characters above 255, the assertion that multi-byte characters are always included is clearly false. λ and ƒ are both multibyte and work fine in keyword syntax specs. ∀ is multibyte, but does not behave like them.

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Noah Luck Easterly

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Oct 31, 2019, 8:51:51 AM10/31/19

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Vim excludes Unicode white-space, punctuation and symbols from iskeyword, which is the right thing to do.

As a default, I agree.

However, that's not a reason to prevent users from customizing iskeyword to include arbitrary codepoints.

As another example, agda is extremely liberal in the identifiers it allows to be used for value and type names:

A name part is a non-empty sequence of printable Unicode characters not containing any of the following reserved characters.
@.(){};_
...

This means that strings like x:A and A→B are valid names. To write the type signature and the function type, white space has to be inserted: x : A, and A → B.

For example, right now I've got a function that has an argument dubbed inv-suc-2^⟨e-1⟩-1. It's pretty long and requires two digraphs to type, but since I can't include ⟨ or ⟩ in iskeyword, I can't use completion to avoid typing it.

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Curiosity

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Jan 29, 2022, 7:58:26 AM1/29/22

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Vim excludes Unicode white-space, punctuation and symbols from iskeyword

where is the official manpage for it ?

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Curiosity

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Jan 29, 2022, 8:07:01 AM1/29/22

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isfname (emphasis mine):
Multi-byte characters 256 and above are always included, only the characters up to 255 are specified with this option. For > > UTF-8 the characters 0xa0 to 0xff are included as well.

this statement for multi-byte charaters is only right for isfname and isprint, but not for iskeyword

I think this statement is quite hard to understand.

For '@'  characters above 255 check the "word" character class (any character
that is not white space or punctuation).

:set iskeyword+=256 or :set iskeyword+=2222, etc. will get E474: Invalid argument: isk+=256 and alike

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Sandy Maguire

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Jan 26, 2023, 12:31:17 PM1/26/23

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What's the status of this? I work on an Agda filetype plugin, and it would be really nice to properly support Agda's identifiers.

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Bram Moolenaar

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Jan 26, 2023, 3:25:53 PM1/26/23

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I'm not aware of someone working on this. It is going to be a lot of work to implement and test properly.

My idea is that while changing this, the usage should be split up, 'iskeyword' is used for various things that might actually need a different value. This can also be used to split up the work in smaller parts, adding new options that overrule 'iskeyword' for a certain purpose. E.g. start with an option to specify word movement with "w", "e" and "b".