Mastering Vim

Classes

While Vim doesn't explicitly contain classes, dictionaries support having methods on them, supporting the object-oriented programming paradigm. There are two ways to define a method on a dictionary.

Given an existing dictionary, animal_names:

let animal_names = {  \ 'cat': 'Miss Cattington',  \ 'dog': 'Mr Dogson',  \ 'parrot': 'Polly'  \ }

You could do the following to add a method to it:

function animal_names.GetGreeting(animal)  return self[a:animal] . ' says hello'endfunction

You can now execute the function:

:echo animal_names.GetGreeting('cat')Miss Cattington says hello

You can use self (just like in Python!) to refer to dictionary keys.

In the previous example, GetGreeting becomes a callable dictionary key. Effectively, ...