Select relative range, ignoring invalid line numbers

Question

I was wondering if there was a syntax for specifying a range of relative lines in vim/ex that does not give 'invalid range' and instead gets as many lines as it can.

There's nothing built in that will work on the command line. If you can narrow your use case, you might be able to accomplish something with a custom function (for example, [vim-abolish](https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish) has a custom substitute command that could be modified to ignore range errors). — Jim Stewart, Nov 02 '18 at 22:04
I just want to display the lines with their line numbers in ex — 0x777C, Nov 03 '18 at 00:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 05 '18 at 12:15

There is no built-in way, but you can resolve the relative ranges into absolute line numbers yourself, and then limit the range to the available lines with :help min() and :help max(). So, for example, the following relative range:

:.-5,.+5 print

is equivalent to this:

:execute (line('.') - 5) . ',' . (line('.') + 5) 'print'

would be converted into this:

:execute max([1, (line('.') - 5)]) . ',' . min([line('$'), (line('.') + 5)]) 'print'

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 08 '20 at 07:46

My CmdlineSpecialEdits plugin has (among many others) a CTRL-G + mapping that changes relative ranges like .-5,.+5 to absolute line numbers and vice versa. It also corrects addressing out of bounds (<= 0 and larger than the last line number) and backwards ranges.

Select relative range, ignoring invalid line numbers

2 Answers2