Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 55

Jump Between Matching Parentheses

Vim provides a motion that lets us move between opening and closing pairs of parentheses. By enabling the matchit.vim plugin, we can extend this behavior to work on pairs of XML tags as well as on keywords in some programming languages.

The % command lets us jump between opening and closing sets of parentheses (see %ⓘ). It works with (), {}, and [], as this example demonstrates:

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
{start}	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])
%	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])
h	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])
%	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])
l	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])
%	console.log([{'a':1},{'b':2}])

To see how we might use % in practice, let’s use this short extract of Ruby:

motions/parentheses.rb ...