Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

Execute

The execute command is used to evaluate a string as if it were a Vimscript command. We saw it in an earlier chapter, but now that we know a bit more about Vimscript Strings we're going to take another look.

Basic Execution

Run the following command:

:execute "echom 'Hello, world!'"

Vim evaluates echom 'Hello, world!' as a command and dutifully echoes it to the screen and message log. Execute is a very powerful tool because it lets you build commands out of arbitrary strings.

Let's try a more useful example. Prepare by opening a file in Vim, then using :edit foo.txt in the same window to open a new buffer. Now run the following command:

:execute "rightbelow vsplit " . bufname("#")

Vim will open the first file in a vertical split to the right of the second file. What happened here?

First, Vim builds the command string by concatenating "rightbelow vsplit " with the result of the bufname("#") call.

We'll look at the function more later, but for now just trust that it returns the path of the previous buffer. You can play with it using echom if you want to see for yourself.

Once bufname is evaluated Vim builds the string "rightbelow vsplit bar.txt". The execute command evaluates this as a Vimscript command which opens the split with the file.

Is Execute Dangerous?

In most programming languages the use of such an "eval" construct to evaluate strings as program code is frowned upon (to put it lightly). Vimscript's execute command doesn't have the same stigma for two reasons.

First, most Vimscript code only ever takes input from a single person: the user. If the user wants to input a tricky string that will cause an execute command to do something bad, well, it's their computer! Contrast this with other languages, where programs constantly take input from untrusted users. Vim is a unique environment where the normal security concerns simply aren't common.

The second reason is that because Vimscript has sometimes arcane and tricky syntax, execute is often the easiest, most straightforward way to get something done. In most other languages using an "eval" construct won't usually save you much typing, but in Vimscript it can collapse many lines into a single one.

Exercises

Skim :help execute to get an idea of some of the things you can and can't use execute for. Don't dive too deeply yet -- we're going to revisit it very soon.

Read :help leftabove, :help rightbelow, :help :split, and :help :vsplit (notice the extra colon in the last two topics).

Add a mapping to your ~/.vimrc file that opens the previous buffer in a split of your choosing (vertical/horizontal, above/below/left/right).