Question

I’m looking for something to put into the vimrc file that runs on startup. I need to check the 2nd line of the file that it opens for:

To:

That’s to and a space, basically those word’s and then nothing after it. If it finds an “empty” To: it takes me to that line at the end, line 2. If To: has text after it then it takes me to line 9.

I use Vim for editing emails in Mutt, and I’m trying to get it to decide if I’m replying to an email (the email address is already there) or creating a new email (I need to enter an address) and take me to the appropriate line.

Not quite sure where to even start with this, I don’t know if I can run function’s on startup in the vimrc and how to tell it to go to the end of X line. I know I can go to a line with:

2gg

but the end of the line and the regex is the hard part for me.

Answer 1

Try

function MuttEnter()
    let l2=getline(2)
    if l2[:3] is# 'To: '
        if len(l2)==3
            2
        else
            9
        endif
        startinsert!
    endif
endfunction
augroup vimrcMutt
    autocmd!
    autocmd VimEnter * call MuttEnter()
augroup END

. Note: it makes sense to have better detection of whether you are editing a mutt message (currently it assumes you do if you have To: (with a space) on the second line).

By the way, you need exactly no regular expressions here, Vim is not as good at optimizing them as perl.