Vim: Text objects

What's a text object?

Text objects are a remarkably useful feature of Vim. They allow you to perform a command inside or around the specified object, where an object is a piece of text with some kind of semantic structure, like a word, paragraph, quoted string, HTML tag, etc.

Examples

1. gqip to reflow text (gq) inside the current paragraph (ip)
2. gUiw to convert inside the current word (iw) to uppercase (gU)
3. ci" to change inside the current matching pair of double quotes
4. da{ to delete inside and around the current matching pair of curly braces

Default text objects

See :help text-objects for Vim's excellent built-in documentation on text objects.

• ( or ), [ or ], { or }, and < or > for matching pairs of braces
  • parentheses and curly braces have b and B aliases respectively
• ", ', and ` for matching pairs of quotes
• t for a matching pair of HTML or XML tags
• w for a word (letters, digits, and underscores, separated by whitespace or a non-word character)
• W for a WORD (any characters, separated by whitespace)
• s and p for sentences and paragraphs respectively

Plugins

There are various Vim plugins that define new kinds of text objects, or otherwise super-power text objects.

vim-indent-object

vim-indent-object provides text objects for indented text.

• ai for the current indentation level, and the line above (useful for Python)
• ii inner indentation level, no surrounding lines
• aI current indentation level, and the surrounding upper/lower lines

vim-textobj-comment

vim-textobj-comment provides text objects for comments, defined by the comments and commentstring settings for the given filetype. It works for /* paired */ and // simple comment delimiters.

• ic for the comment text
• ac for the comment text and the comment delimiters

vim-surround

vim-surround doesn't provide text objects, but it does provide powerful utilities for surrounding text objects.

• ds - delete surrounding (and only the surrounding, the surrounded text is left alone)
  • ds<count> - delete the nth surrounding
  • Example: Given <div><p><em>cursor here</em></p></div> with the cursor inside the <em> tags, ds3t will delete the surrounding <div> tags
• cs - change surrounding
  • Example: cs'" change surrounding single quotes to double quotes
• ys - add surrounding (mnemonic: you surround)
  • Example: ysiw* will surround the current word in *'s
  • Example: ysa"fprint will surround a quoted string in a function call to print()
  • Example: ysiw<a href="foo"> will surround the current word in an HTML link to foo