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Comment by Fellshard | Hacker News Reader

Higher precision in intent for many standard operations. These aren't perfectly Vim commands, but from the Vim-like 'evil mode' for emacs, I have some examples of common idioms I use frequently:

- 'I want to change the name of this variable. <cw> (Change Word)'

- 'I want to copy the contents of this braced block. <yi{> (Yank Inside Matching-braces)'

- 'I want to surround this word in parentheses. <vaws(> (Visual-mode (region selection) Around Word Surround-with Matching-parens)'

You get used to the separate modes fairly quickly. Your existing editor already works that way when switching between 'region' and 'insert' modes; it's just the command mode that throws people off initially. It's not that rough, especially if you have a reasonably placed key to return to command mode.

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> - 'I want to surround this word in parentheses. <vaws(> (Visual-mode (region selection) Around Word Surround-with Matching-parens)'

Holy shit, thank you. I've been looking for something like this for half a decade and never found it (I don't even know how I missed it!)

ysiwb yank-surround-in-word-brackets also does it. If you have https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround/ installed.

Could you please explain why we use Yank here? From what I understand yank puts the surround-in-word in a register.

But there is nothing surrounding the word! I thought yank was for copying and pasting stuff. I can't understand why ysiwb works :(

I believe that this is just an arbitrary choice that doesn't collide with other keys and is fairly consistent with the other keybindings — cs for changing delimiters, ds for deleting delimiters, and ys for creating delimiters.

Thanks! That's really thorny. It goes against the grain of composability and logically destructuring the command into verbs and actions and modifiers.

They should not overload y for yank. Choose anything else that's not used.

Thanks for the translation! I'll keep that around for future reference.

I believe Vim-proper needs a plugin for that behaviour, so keep that in mind.

Do you know what plugin it is? I will try to search for an evil version (Or I could just write my own, but my task list is large and my energy very low these days)

https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround

This is vim-surround by tpope[1]. It does way more than just basic brackets!

[1]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround

bcw()<Esc>P will do it without plugins.

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