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Comment by Rainymood | Hacker News Reader

when I learned about f and F a whole new world opened up for me. It never ceases to amaze me how amazing vim is. Another quick thing I recently learned (yes, novice vim user here) is stuff like this

\includegraphics{test.png}

if you stand inside the curly brackets and type ciB (change in Brackets) you get this

\includegraphics{}

with your cursor active inside the brackets, just awesome ..

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TIMTOWTDI: ci{ does the same

(I think of "B" as beginning of a Word [including punctuation], so it would confuse me to use the "B" meaning braces)

nice. I was wondering how one would accomplish the same with parens, i.e. ci(. Why does this work? It doesn't seem to match the usual building of commands. I mean this obviously isn't c command followed by i command followed by paren. Is it just special?

I don't know if I am understanding your question correctly.

I read 'ci(' as change what's inside parents. I read 'ci{' as change inside braces. 'ca(' and 'ca{' grab the parents and the braces as well.

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These combinations work for (d)elete as well. If your cursor is over the 4th letter of a 6 letter word, 'dw' will delete to the end of the word. 'diw' on the other hand will delete the whole word. (I've never tried 'daw' although I know 'da(' works)

right. I guess what I meant was 'c' and 'd' are usually followed by movements, so stuff like 'dt)' makes sense to me. 'i' on the other hand is not a movement, so the behavior of 'di)' was surprising to me.

It's because 'iw', 'aw', and the like are commands of their own when an operator like 'c' or 'd' precedes [1]. So 'di)' is interpreted as 'd' followed by the 'i)' command (if I'm interpreting it correctly!), not as 'd' followed by 'i' followed by ')', which is nonsense.

I hope that was clear - just trying to understand vim better :)

[1]: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/motion.html#text-objec...

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