Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 52

Trace Your Selection with Precision Text Objects

Text objects allow us to interact with parentheses, quotes, XML tags, and other common patterns that appear in text.

Take a look at this code sample:

motions/template.js

var tpl = [
  '<a href="{url}">{title}</a>'
]

Each opening { character is balanced by a closing } character. The same is true of [ and ], < and >, and the opening and closing HTML tags, <a> and </a>. This sample also contains single and double quotation marks, which come in pairs.

Vim understands the structure of these well-formed patterns, and it allows us to operate on the regions of text that they delimit. Text objects define regions of text by structure (see text-objectsⓘ). With only a couple of keystrokes, ...