The Path to Zen

About marks

An exerpt from dicsucssion thread “any way to highlight a mark?” on the vim user list.

Will Fiveash started the thread by asking how to see marks on left hand side of a window. A couple of users pointed him to the showmarks plugin, which is the best mark plugin so far, but with one caveat that any mark made on line 1 isn’t shown. Salman Halim pointed out the reason:

“There is no way to remove marks in Vim; the script simulates the removal
of a mark by setting it to line 1 and just not displaying signs for any
marks that map to line 1. Not a bug; more a way to allow the user to not
be stuck looking at marks that they don’t find relevant.”

Tim Chase then proposed that marks could be removed by removing the line bearing the mark and restoring the line. Antoine J. Mechelynck also proposed to create a new line, move the mark there, and delete the line along with the mark. He also pointed out that the ‘modified’ status can be saved and restored around either methods him and Chase proposed to avoid the buffer being marked modified.

As an (almost) conclusion to this discussion, Charles E. Cambell, Jr. posted a patch that actually implements a ‘markclear’ function.