Question

Is there a way in Vim in which I could navigate to the next differing indent level?

So from here to there for example:

-> var a = 1;
   var b = 2;
   var func = function(){
->     return a + b;
   }

Answer 1

This should work for indents made up of spaces (not tabs):

call search('^ \{0,'.eval(indent(".")-1).'}\S\|^ \{'.eval(indent(".")+1).',}\S')

This is made up of two regular expressions:

• ^ \{0,'.eval(indent(".")-1).'}\S matches a smaller indent, using the \{n,m} construction matching from n to m of the preceding space.
• ^ \{'.eval(indent(".")+1).',}\S' matches a larger indent, using the \{n,} construction matching at least n of the preceding space.

The regexes are sandwiched between ^ and \S to apply only to the leading whitespace on the line. Then they are joined by the \| (‘OR’) operator.

Of course the search() call could be mapped to a key combination for convenience.

EDIT

Chris Johnsen points out that the calls to eval() are superfluous, so the command can be reduced to this:

call search('^ \{0,'.(indent(".")-1).'}\S\|^ \{'.(indent(".")+1).',}\S')