Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 53

Delete Around, or Change Inside

Text objects usually come in pairs: one that acts inside the object and another that acts around the object. In this tip, we’ll examine a typical use case for each kind of text object.

Vim’s text objects fall into two categories: those that interact with pairs of delimiters, such as i), i", and it, and those that interact with chunks of text, such as words, sentences, and paragraphs. Here’s a summary of the latter.

Keystrokes	Current…	Keystrokes	Current…
iw	word	aw	word plus space(s)
iW	WORD	aW	WORD plus space(s)
is	sentence	as	sentence plus space(s)
ip	paragraph	ap	paragraph plus blank line(s)

I’ve labeled the first category as delimited text objects because they begin and end with matching symbols. Words, sentences, ...