I, as I expect a lot of you do, work in some languages that use camelCaseForNaming (JavaScript), and others that prefer the_snake_case_way_of_things (Ruby). I don’t really have a preference to which one I use, but sometimes I get frustrated by Vim’s w command (and the corresponding b command), and how it doesn’t treat underscores or an upper-case letter in a long variable name as a new word.

For example, if I have the following, with my cursor on the starting ‘s’:

someLongMethodCall();

What I want is for w to take me to the capital L, then to the capital M, then the C, and so on. Similarly with this code:

some_long_method_call

I’d like to be able to jump between the underscores.

I’ve never been able to find a way to do this until now. The solution is the brilliant CamelCase Motion plugin. This provides commands for jumping intelligently, as I described above, and works with both CamelCase and snake_case.

What I’ve done is simply map w, b and e to the CamelCase versions:

map <silent> w <Plug>CamelCaseMotion_w
map <silent> b <Plug>CamelCaseMotion_b
map <silent> e <Plug>CamelCaseMotion_e
sunmap w
sunmap b
sunmap e

Thank you to Reddit user “nandryshak” for mentioning this in a r/vim thread.

w, b and e will now work mostly as before, except when it detects camel casing or snake case, at which point it will act accordingly. Perfect!

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