Question

I downloaded the Matchit plugin and used it on my HTML file. Everything worked as it was supposed to until I used it on my list.

<ol>
    <li id="link-1"><a href="http://www.reddit.com/">reddit</a></li>
    <li id="link-2"><a href="http://www.vim.org/">vim</a></li>
    <li id="link-3"><a href="http://www.w3schools.com/">w3schools</a></li>
</ol>

If the cursor is on the first o when I press tab the cursor jumps to the first list item instead of the closing ol. And when I’m on the l of the first list item the cursor jumps to the l of the next list item tag. But if I move the cursor over to the first a of the link tag and hit tab then Matchit works just fine and jumps to the closing tag. Matchit works for all tags but list items? How do I fix this behavior?

Answer 1

For starter, matchit is distributed with Vim without being activated. You don’t need to download it, just follow the instructions at :help matchit-install.

Matchit uses a buffer variable called b:match_words to define pairs of matching tags: open an HTML file and type echo b:match_words. The value, here, is:

<:>,<\@<=[ou]l\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=li\>:<\@<=/[ou]l>,<\@<=dl\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=d[td]\>:<\@<=/dl>,<\@<=\([^/][^ \t>]*\)[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=/\1>

If I understand :help matchit and these patterns correctly, the <\@<=[ou]l\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=li\>:<\@<=/[ou]l> part is where the “problem” is. Notice that the behaviour is the same for definition lists: instead of jumping to the end tag, matchit jumps to intermediary tags.

I’d guess that pasting this in an HTML ftplugin and doing a bit of customizing would solve the problem.

edit

This line seems to completely resolve the issue:

autocmd FileType html let b:match_words='<:>,<\@<=\([^/][^ \t>]*\)[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=/\1>'

I’ve just removed the two totally unecessary pattern definitions for <ul|ol> and <dl>, leaving only the basic matches.