Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 23

Prefer Operators to Visual Commands Where Possible

Visual mode may be more intuitive than Vim’s Normal mode of operation, but it has a weakness: it doesn’t always play well with the dot command. We can route around this weakness by using Normal mode operators when appropriate.

Suppose that we want to transform the following list of links to make them shout:

visual_mode/list-of-links.html

<a href="#">one</a>
<a href="#">two</a>
<a href="#">three</a>

We can select the inner contents of a tag by running vit, which can be read as: visually select inside the tag. The it command is a special kind of motion called a text object, which we’ll cover in detail in Tip 52.

Using a Visual Operator

In Visual mode, we make a selection and ...