Question

I would like to mimic Textmates CTRL+ALT+w, which creates a new pair of opening and closing HTML tags on the same line.

In VIM Surround I’m using CTRL+st in Edit mode for this, but it always indents and creates a new line after setting the tag, so that it looks like this (* = cursor position):

<p>
  *
</p>

Is there a way to achieve this? :

<p>*</p>

Answer 1

I guess your problem is that the selected area is “line wise”. For example, if you select a few lives with V and surround it with tags, the tags will be placed one line above and one bellow the selected lines.

You probably want to create a “character wise” selection, with v before surrounding it.

Anyway, please post the map you created, so we can help debugging this.

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Update

After some clarification in the comments, I would tell you that the surround plugin is not the best option. As its name describes, it was created to deal with surrounded content. So you may need content to surround.

In your case, I recommend taking a look in HTML AutoCloseTag. This plugin closes the html tag once you type the >. It is certainly more appropriated, and uses less keystrokes than surround.

<p         <--- Now when you type ">", if becomes:
<p>|</p>   <--- Where "|" is the cursor.

Obviously, you will get this behavior to every tag. But that may be handy if you like it.