Vim text objects, extend Vim's natural language!

One of the magical things about Vim is that it uses nouns and verbs to construct an editing language. For example d (delete) is a verb and w (word) is a noun. By combining a noun & verb we make an edit. Learning this language is key to getting the most out of your editing, I recommend this great talk by Chris Toomey if this concept is new to you.

Once you have the basics down you know how to operate on the standard text objects that vim provides you might want to start adding your own. Thankfully there are some excellent plugins to add a whole host of extra objects. What is nice about these extensions to the language is they feel natural and intuitive and don't take much investment to learn at all.

Examples

Below I have listed a few of my favourite extensions with a link to the plugin on Github as well as the Plug line for them. I've also added a very simple "selling point" on what the plugins do, but if one piques your interest do check out the full docs on the github page because a lot of these are a lot more powerful than the simple examples I am listing. Also pipe (|) denotes cursor position.

Surround

This is probably the most essential plugin for Vim, it feels totally natural and whenever I encounter vanilla Vim I inevitably try to use it forgetting that it isn't there by default!

This allows us to select (surrounding) brackets, braces, quotes, etc. So cs"' would change surrounding "'s to ''s.

"b|ar" -> cs"' -> 'bar'

Plug 'tpope/surround'

Targets

Vim allows us to do things like ci" to change text inside quotes, but what about other markers? Targets lets us do this to pretty much everything else that would encapsulate text, such as ,'s or +'s.

For examples to delete a string from a concatenation da+, will remove the string and + from under the cursor.

foo + 'str|ing' + bar -> da+ -> foo + bar

Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'

Text Object User

This isn't in itself a text object, but it provides an easy framework for other users to create their own. This means that it is a pre-requisite for all of the following objects.

I will list my favourite ones, but I recommend you check out this list of all the existing objects that have been created for this framework, as I suspect there are some that might appeal to you and not me!

Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-user'

Indent

Ever wanted to select a block of code by it's indentation level? Well this allows you to do just that, with ii and ai.

foo                      foo  
  b|ar   ->  `dii`  ->   foo
  bar
foo  

Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-indent'

Comments

This is really handy, especially for multi-line comments. Simply provides ic and ac to edit comments.

// Co|mment -> cic -> // |...

Plug 'glts/vim-textobj-comment'

Functions

This works for Java and C, however there is most likely a language specific version that will provide the same functionality. I use this one for JavaScript.

You can now use if and af to select the contents of a function or the whole function itself.

 void foo() {                    void foo() {
   return bar;   -> `dif` ->     }
 }

Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-function'

Conclusions

There are a lot more of these extensions out there, for your specific language or for that common repeating text pattern that you want to operate on, but can never find a nice way of selecting it.

I usually advise against adding lots of plugins at once, but hopefully with the use of the vim language these should seem like second nature as soon as you are aware of the new objects you can operate on.

:wq