At the beginning of last year I wrote a weblog entry about how to write a function that removes all space but one in Vim. It didn’t work like I wanted, but now it does.

function JustOneSpace()
    " replace all whitespace around the cursor with a space
    s/\s*\%#\s*/ /e
    " search backwards for a space
    call search(' ', 'be')
    " move to the first character after the space
    normal l
endfunction

nmap <space> :call JustOneSpace()<cr>

I added the call to the search() function to move to the space that was substituted. All this time I wanted to fix this function by using regexes or special vim variables. I couldn’t find these. This is quite obvious, but it didn’t come to mind at first.

Update

I looks like this function doesn’t work when it’s used on a line with no space. It will insert a space on the spot it is supposed to, but then moves the cursor to the first space it finds when searching backwards.