2015-03-14
One of the most powerful features in Vim is text objects. These increase the number of ‘vim nouns’ that you can use with ‘vim verbs’.
Imagine your cursor is in the middle of a paragraph you want to delete. Instead of laboriously deleting single lines, you could just type dip for ’ delete inner paragraph’. The text object represents the entire paragraph.
A list of these is:
iw inner word it inner xml / html tag is inner sentence i' inner single quotation marks i" inner double quotation marks i{ inner { ... } braces i[ inner [ ... ] braces i( inner ( ... ) braces ip inner paragraph im inner ruby method (from the vim-textobj-rubyblock plugin)
The same commands also work with a for a (eg. ca( will also change a bracket, rather than just the contents of them)
For an in-depth explanation, type :h text-objects into vim.