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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T20:08:33+00:00

There’s probably a better way to do this, but this is what I’m trying

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There’s probably a better way to do this, but this is what I’m trying to do. I have several html files for which I need to update meta tags prior to updating the content. I’m trying to automate this by using a keyboard mapping similar to what follows:

nnoremap <leader>mt /<meta name="developer"<cr>f";;lct"$username

This seems to work with the exception of the $username portion. How can I make the mapping evaluate the variable?

I do have a few tags to update per page, but don’t know how else to do this. If someone has a better method, I’d be more than happy to hear it. The content that I’m searching through is similar to the following:

<meta name="owner" content="someowner">
<meta name="developer" content="somedev">
<meta name="date" content="2012-07-26">
<meta name="expires" content="2013-07-26">

The date would be the date that I opened the file to edit, while the expires would be one year from the date

NOTE: This is gvim on Windows if that changes things.

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  1. Editorial Team

    $username does refer to the environment variable username, but to use this in a mapping, you have to stick to the (somewhat unintuitive, but perfectly consistent) interpretation rules of Vim.

    The ct" mean change until double-quote, so what follows is in insert mode. To insert an environment variable (or any other Vim expression), use <C-R>=:

    nnoremap <leader>mt /<meta name="developer"<cr>f";;lct"<C-R>=$username<CR>

    This will evaluate the environment variable on each mapping invocation. (And stay in insert mode; append <Esc> to go back to normal mode!) Alternatively, you could also bake the value into the mapping itself:

    execute 'nnoremap <leader>mt /<meta name="developer"<cr>f";;lct"' . $username
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