Vim tip 33: editing with text objects

Combining motions such as w, % and f with editing commands like d, c and y require precise positioning to be effective.

Vim also provides a list of handy context based options to make certain editing use cases easier using the i and a text object selections. You can easily remember the difference between these two options by thinking i as inner and a as around.

diw delete a word regardless of where the cursor is on that word
- equivalent to using de when the cursor is on the first character of the word
diW delete a WORD regardless of where the cursor is on that WORD
daw delete a word regardless of where the cursor is on that word as well as a space character to the left/right of the word depending on its position in the current sentence
dis delete a sentence regardless of where the cursor is on that sentence
yas copy a sentence regardless of where the cursor is on that sentence as well as a space character to the left/right
cip delete a paragraph regardless of where the cursor is on that paragraph and change to Insert mode
dit delete all characters within HTML/XML tags, nesting is taken care as well
- see :h tag-blocks for details about corner cases
di" delete all characters within a pair of double quotes, regardless of where the cursor is within the quotes
da' delete all characters within a pair of single quotes along with the quote characters
ci( delete all characters within () and change to Insert mode
- works even if the parenthesis are spread over multiple lines, nesting is taken care as well
ya} copy all characters within {} including the {} characters
- works even if the braces are spread over multiple lines, nesting is taken care as well

You can use a count prefix for nested cases. For example, c2i{ will clear the inner braces (including the braces, and this could be nested too) and then only the text between braces for the next level.

See :h text-objects for more details.

Video demo: