Jump to matching "done" while editing bash script in vi

Question

In vi, the % key can be used to jump to a matching opening or closing parenthesis, square bracket or a curly brace.

Could it also be used to jump between matching "do" and "done" in a bash loop?

Answer 1

Not "vi" as such. vim does that. There is a script matchit.vim which can do this:

• The script is documented in the vim wiki page Moving to matching braces.
• It part of the vim distribution, but is not installed (in your ~/.vim/plugin directory) by default. See the vim help for matchit-install for details.

• Once installed, it has to be enabled, e.g., (see matchit.zip : extended % matching for HTML, LaTeX, and many other languages):

  filetype plugin on

  in your vimrc file.

For further reading:

• Vim: Jumping to if endif in fortran uses simply runtime macros/matchit.vim rather than the two-part install from the vim wiki.
• Matchit not working has several answers, some disagreeing.

The runtime macros/matchit.vim line in ~/.vimrc did not make matchit.vim work in my quick test; the procedure in matchit-install, plus the filetype line did work. As usual, your configuration may differ.

I maintain (and of course use) vi-like-emacs, and wrote comparable functionality for that editor using a different approach (see discussion of "fences" in documentation). In a quick test, I see that matchit.vim does not know about the syntax for case-values in a shell case statement. So there is some room for improvement.