Practical Vim

Tip 52

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. You can find a summary of the latter in Table 13, ​Bounded Text Objects​.

Table 13. Bounded Text Objects

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
iw	Current word
aw	Current word plus one space
iW	Current WORD
aW	Current WORD plus one space
is	Current sentence
as	Current sentence plus one space
ip	Current paragraph
ap	Current paragraph plus one blank line ...