Evil-snipe layer

• Alternative implementation of vim's default search operations.
• Replacement of evil-surround with a two-character search.
• Support for alternative scopes for default search operations.
• Support for alternative motions based on configurable regexps.

To use this configuration layer, add it to your ~/.spacemacs. You will need to add evil-snipe to the existing dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in this file.

With evil-snipe you can define your own search scope for f and t searches which means that you won't have to jump to the correct line before searching with f / t / F / T. And after you have found a match, you can just press f or t again afterwards to continue the search. No need to use ; / ~​,​~.

This alternate behavior is disabled by default, to enable it set the layer variable evil-snipe-enable-alternate-f-and-t-behaviors to t:

(setq-default dotspacemacs-configuration-layers
  '((evil-snipe :variables evil-snipe-enable-alternate-f-and-t-behaviors t)))

With the s~/~S keys you can do a simple search like f~/~t, but instead of searching for one character, you search for two. This makes the search a lot more precise than regular f~/~t searches. While you can search forward or backwards in the buffer with / and ?, s / S are much easier to reach, don't require you to press enter and they are precise enough for many common purposes.

Evil-snipe also adds several scope options for searches (set evil-snipe-scope and evil-snipe-repeat-scope to one of these, the default value is buffer):

If you do not want to replace the regular f / F / t / T behavior, just remove this line from evil-snipe/packages.el: (evil-snipe-replace-evil)

With symbol groups you can let a character stand for a regex, for example a group of characters. By adding a pair of (CHAR REGEX) to the list evil-snipe-aliases you can search for a regex very simply:

• Here we set the [ character to mean all characters [({ in all modes so a search with sa[ would find a[, a{ or a(.

  ;; Alias [ and ] to all types of brackets
  (push '(?\[ "[[{(]") evil-snipe-aliases)
  (push '(?\] "[]})]") evil-snipe-aliases)
  

• Here we set the char : to mean "a regex matching python function definitions" (but only in python-mode), so by searching with f:fff you can quickly cycle through all function definitions in a buffer!

  ;; For python style functions
  (add-hook 'python-mode-hook
            (lambda ()
              (make-variable-buffer-local 'evil-snipe-aliases)
              (push '(?: "def .+:") evil-snipe-aliases)))