coerce.kak

a vim-abolish-style casing coercion plugin for the kakoune editor

Installation

You can use the built-in plugin insfrastructure in kakoune by adding the rc/coerce.kak to the autoload directory: ~/.config/kak/autoload.

Or use the wonderful plug.kak

plug 'the-mikedavis/coerce.kak' %{
  map global normal + ': coerce-mode<ret>'
}

Usage

coerce.kak defines a user-mode called coerce with bindings for different casings. You must bind the coerce user-mode to a mode key: the kakoune Wiki documents some unbound keys you may use. For example, this will bind the coerce user-mode to + in normal mode.

coerce.kak also provides a coerce-mode command that lazily requires the coerce module. This can improve start-up time.

map global normal + ': coerce-mode<ret>'

If you use the user-mode/leader-key feature, you can bind a key to get to the coerce mode from the user mode:

map global user c ': coerce-mode<ret>' -docstring "coercion mode"

Now you can coerce the casing of any selection by entering that mode and pressing

• c for camelCase
• p for PascalCase
• s for snake_case
• k for kebab-case

Want to use these bindings without the coerce user-mode? Feel free to copy/paste the ones you want out to a custom configuration (the Unlicense has you covered :).

Other casings

I have only implemented the casings I find useful. PRs are welcome for more casings, but be mindful that many casings can be created with the existing implemented casings plus default kakoune bindings like ~ (uppercase the selection).

For example, to implement SHOUT_CASE, one may simply run the snake_case coersion on a selection and then type ~.

These can be added à la carte to your own configuration by adding a hook to the ModuleLoaded like so:

hook global ModuleLoaded coerce %{
  map global coerce -docstring "SHOUT_CASE" 'S' "<esc>: require-module coerce; coerce-snake; execute-keys '~'<ret>"
}

Or with plug.kak:

plug 'the-mikedavis/coerce.kak' config %{
  # set up the binding for coerce-mode here
} defer %{
  map global coerce -docstring "SHOUT_CASE" 'S' "<esc>: require-module coerce; coerce-snake; execute-keys '~'<ret>"
}

How it works

coerce.kak defines a module called coerce and a user-mode (also called coerce. The module defines some functions that use kakoune's execute-keys feature to operate on selections. execute-keys allows one to work across multiple selections and does not have any external dependencies. In contrast, the first version of this plugin piped out to sed which does not work across multiple selections and can be brittle depending on the distribution of sed installed on any given machine.

Generally the coercions start by coercing to either snake or camel case and then modifying those resulting selections into kebab or pascal case.

If you're interested in what those big execute-keys strings do, try pasting them into @Delapouite's awesome Kakoune Explain tool.

See also

What about dmerejkowsky/kak-subvert? That looks good and might even provide better replacement results but I don't wanna have to install the rust toolchain :P

Admittedly I did not see FlyingWombat/case.kak before writing this plugin. case.kak has more casings and helper functions, but it can error out on edge cases such as trying to convert something in snake_case to snake_case. This plugin tries to be as forgiving of input as possible.