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Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

Here's my favourite:

vi"

If your cursor is within two quotes on a line, it will select everything inside those quotes to (c)hange, (y)ank or (d)elete or whatever you want. Great if you're the sort of person who writes HTML by hand all the time.

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The v is redundant unless you want highlighting. You can do yi" directly (or ci" or di").

For more fun, activate vim-surround. E.g. to replace surrounding quotes with parentheses: cs"(

it's fun, I have had vim-surround installed for years but keep forgetting how that it exists.

vi"p or vi"P is a great way to overwrite "" contents with the contents of your unnamed register

I habitually use visual mode for a lot of stuff like that so quick flash shows me what was affected (in case of typo). If the highlighted part isn't what I expected I instantly know to undo, rather than having to think about the resulting text for a moment.

Same. Which shows a weakness of vim, I think it’d be much more usable if it had the verb last: iw would select the word then you can delete, yank, or even extend the selection knowing exactly what you’re going to operate on.

I think kakoune works like that, but I don’t have the will to learn another editor and vi is what’s available everywhere anyway

The problem with Kakoune-like object-action order is that you need more modifier keys.

surround and sneak are my desert island vim plugins

You can also use yi" to yank it immediately without selecting it first (replace y with c or d to change or delete, respectively). Replace i with a to include the quotes ("around" rather than "inside"). Replace " with ( [ or { to match other kinds of bracketing characters. And include a number to go more than one set out.

E.g.

    y2a(

means yank everything inside (and including) the second nested pair of parentheses out from the current point.

Tbh I hate that vim keeps wanting to make me count. I don’t know if it is the first, second or third nested pair of parentheses, and the time for me to count is probably similar than the time to just select with the mouse. I struggle to believe anybody actually counts when using vim , whether it’s levels of nesting or number of lines.

I wish vim was better at showing what you’re going to operate on, and edit it before the operation. Eg a( could select out of the first parentheses then n to extend until everything I want selected is, then y

You might like Kakoune, which basically works how you describe.

Doesn’t have to be within, will visually select the contents of the first quotes on the line!

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