Question

I am trying to set a mapping for FileType perl. The mapping is for the case when I forgot to use semicolon at the end of the line.

So first I tried adding in my .vimrc autocmd! FileType perl nnoremap <leader>; $a;<esc> and it worked fine but than I thought of using ftlugin/perl.vim .

So I added the below line in my corresponding ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/perl.vim

nnoremap <buffer> <leader>; $a;<esc>

but it didn’t work.

Any idea why it is not working ?

My perl version is perl 5, version 14.

Answer 1

Try putting the file in ~/.vim/ftplugin/perl.vim instead of ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/perl.vim. From :help after-directory:

                      *after-directory*
4. In the "after" directory in the system-wide Vim directory.  This is
   for the system administrator to overrule or add to the distributed
   defaults (rarely needed)
5. In the "after" directory in your home directory.  This is for
   personal preferences to overrule or add to the distributed defaults
   or system-wide settings (rarely needed).

From :help ftplugin:

If you do want to use the default plugin, but overrule one of the settings,
you can write the different setting in a script: >

setlocal textwidth=70

Now write this in the “after” directory, so that it gets sourced after the
distributed “vim.vim” ftplugin |after-directory|. For Unix this would be
“~/.vim/after/ftplugin/vim.vim”. Note that the default plugin will have set
“b:did_ftplugin”, but it is ignored here.