I sat on this plugin for 3 years before releasing it, primarily because it's so gosh darn hard to explain. It's three superficially unrelated plugins in one that share a common theme: working with variants of a word.

I know how to spell "separate". I know how to spell "desperate". My fingers, however, have trouble distinguishing between the two, and I invariably have a 50 percent chance of typing "seperate" or "desparate" each time one of these comes up. At first, I tried abbreviations:

:iabbrev  seperate  separate
:iabbrev desparate desperate

But this falls short at the beginning of a sentence.

:iabbrev  Seperate  Separate
:iabbrev Desparate Desperate

To be really thorough, we need uppercase too!

:iabbrev  SEPERATE  SEPARATE
:iabbrev DESPARATE DESPERATE

Oh, but consider the noun form, and the adverb form!

:iabbrev  seperation  separation
:iabbrev desparation desperation
:iabbrev  seperately  separately
:iabbrev desparately desperately
:iabbrev  Seperation  separation
:iabbrev Desparation Desperation
:iabbrev  Seperately  Separately
:iabbrev Desparately Desperately
:iabbrev  SEPERATION  SEPARATION
:iabbrev DESPARATION DESPERATION
:iabbrev  SEPERATELY  SEPARATELY
:iabbrev DESPARATELY DESPERATELY

Wait, there's also "separates", "separated", "separating", "separations", "separator"...

Abolish.vim provides a simpler way. The following one command produces 48 abbreviations including all of the above.

:Abolish {despa,sepe}rat{e,es,ed,ing,ely,ion,ions,or}  {despe,sepa}rat{}

My current configuration has 25 Abolish commands that create hundreds of corrections my fingers refuse to learn.

One time I had an application with a domain model called "facility" that needed to be renamed to "building". So, a simple search and replace, right?

:%s/facility/building/g

Oh, but the case variants!

:%s/Facility/Building/g
:%s/FACILITY/BUILDING/g

Wait, the plural is more than "s" so we need to get that too!

:%s/facilities/buildings/g
:%s/Facilities/Buildings/g
:%s/FACILITIES/BUILDINGS/g

Abolish.vim has your back. One command to do all six, and you can repeat it with & too!

:%Subvert/facilit{y,ies}/building{,s}/g

From a conceptual level, one way to think about how this substitution works is to imagine that in the braces you are declaring the requirements for turning that word from singular to plural. In the facility example, the same base letters in both the singular and plural form of the word are facilit To turn "facility" to a plural word you must change the y to ies so you specify {y,ies} in the braces.

To convert the word "building" from singular to plural, again look at the common letters between the singular and plural forms: building. In this case you do not need to remove any letter from building to turn it into plural form and you need to add an s so the braces should be {,s}.

A few more examples:

Address to Reference

:Subvert/address{,es}/reference{,s}/g

Blog to Post (you can just do this with a regular :s also)

:Subvert/blog{,s}/post{,s}/g

Child to Adult

:Subvert/child{,ren}/adult{,s}/g

Be amazed as it correctly turns the word children into the word adults!

Die to Spinner

:Subvert/di{e,ce}/spinner{,s}/g

You can abbreviate it as :S, and it accepts the full range of flags including things like c (confirm).

There's also a variant for searching and a variant for grepping.

Want to turn fooBar into foo_bar? Press crs (coerce to snake_case). MixedCase (crm), camelCase (crc), snake_case (crs), and UPPER_CASE (cru) are all just 3 keystrokes away. These commands support repeat.vim.

If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish.git

Once help tags have been generated, you can view the manual with :help abolish.

Like abolish.vim? Follow the repository on GitHub and vote for it on vim.org. And if you're feeling especially charitable, follow tpope on Twitter and GitHub.

Copyright (c) Tim Pope. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license.