Question

The mark " in Vim takes you to your last cursor position. I want to create an alias that will open my Vim instance and jump to that mark; something which is obviously extremely useful.

This works from the command line:

$ vim -c "'\"" File.cpp

Now I want to make an alias for this:

$ alias v='vim -c "'\""'

Well that’s not going to work! You need to escape the first single quote you say…

$ alias v='vim -c "\'\""'

Hmm. That didn’t work either… So I try a whole lot of variations of single quoted and double quoted madness, bang my head against the table and load up stackoverflow in my browser, and here we are.

How do I properly escape this alias?

Edit

In fact there is a better way to do this :h last-position-jump.

This autocommand jumps to the last known position in a file just after opening it, if the '" mark is set:

:au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 1 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | exe "normal! g'\"" | endif

Answer 1

This looks completely obscure, but should work:

alias v='vim -c "'"'"'\""'

That’s a single-quoted vim -c ", followed by a double-quoted ', followed by a single-quoted \""…