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.