Vim text object

What are text objects?

For quite a while now Vim is my text editor of choice. Once accustomed to all its features Vim is an editor hard to compete with. Even though I know a pretty substantial amount of Vim’s shortcuts by now, I had some kind of a “blind spot” - situations where I felt there got to be a better way to do it, but didn’t know how.

A typical use case

You have a (longer) word that you want to change/delete/yank. Very often your cursor is not at the beginning of the word, but commands like cw/dw/yw will only do the trick if the cursor is at the beginning of the word, otherwise just part of the word is going to be affected.

This blind spot is covered by text objects. Text objects are a really handy feature of Vim worth knowing about. Basically they offer some text interpretation intelligence. This means Vim is able to tell what is a word, a paragraph or text enclosed by delimiters. A good introduction is given by this article. Basically you have the key chars i for inner and a for outer followed by a qualifier, e.g. w for word or s for sentence.

This means the shortcuts I was looking for are ciw, diw and yiw.

Conclusion

Text objects really help to select or change text faster, because Vim helps you to apply logic to the text. This results in a boost of productivity, even though you just save on a few keystrokes (this adds up quickly). It is also possible to create your own text objects if you have special needs.