Neovim train motions

I’ve found very interesting but little known neovim plugin, train.nvim. It’s readme is pretty confusing, so I’ll describe it here.

Introduction

Vim movements can be grouped as:

• Left/Right - ‘h’, ‘l’, ‘0’, ‘gm’, ‘gM’, ‘^’, ‘$’, they move your cursor across the line :h left-right-motions
• Up/Down - ‘k’, ‘j’, ‘G’, ‘gg’, ‘H’, ‘M’, ‘L’, they move your cursor up or down :h up-down-motions
• Word motions - ‘w’, ‘W’, ‘e’, ‘E’, ‘b’, ‘B’, ‘ge’, ‘gE’, they move over words :h word-motions
• Text objects - ‘(‘, ‘)’, ‘[’, ‘]’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘[[’, ‘]]’, ‘][’, ‘[]’, move over text objects i.e. sentence or paragraph :h object-motions

What ‘train’ does, is highlights all these possible motions, drawing small floating windows with motion key(s), which disappears when you move your cursor.

What’s really cool, is that ‘train’ emulates those possible moves by:

• remember your current position
• jump to move in list
• draw floating window with motion key
• just to initial position

That allows it to emulate every possible motion or set of motion, like ‘2k{‘ or even your own custom motions.

Usage

To use built-in list of commands, trigger one of:

" Train for movements up and down
:TrainUpDown

" Train for movements related to words
:TrainWord

" Train for movements related to text objects
:TrainTextObj

If you, for example only want to train paragraph movement, you can define your own set of motions with:

call train#show_matches(['{', '}'])

Assign it to mapping for easy trigger, for example to zx:

nnoremap <silent> zx :call call train#show_matches(['{', '}'])<cr>

Sometimes you have to clear floating windows manually. To do this, execute:

:TrainClear

Auto trigger train

I like the idea of automatically triggering train when I’m in idle for some tome. With that, when I’m back to work, I see all possible moves on my screen. To do this, I attach command to CursorHold event.

" Automatically Trigger Train each 10 sec
augroup auto_show_train
    au!
    setlocal updatetime=10000
    autocmd CursorHold * if &l:buftype !=# 'help' | execute 'normal zx' | endif
augroup end