Veezus Kreist

It must be noted that my first experience at Hashrocket with vim was a few weeks pairing with Tim Pope (the dude who wrote the rails.vim plugin you should be using) on a rescue mission. I didn’t touch the keyboard for three days – that’s how many hours of watching the man operate it took me to absorb the ridiculously awesome things he was doing. Credit for nearly all of my vim knowledge goes to him. The rest goes to the other Rocketeers who put up with my continual discussions about how to more quickly achieve line edits.

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I thought I might sit down and document some key ways that I interact with vim, and then I realized that would take a couple hours and way more thought than I want to put into a drunken Saturday night. So I decided to talk only about targets instead.

In vim are the concepts of actions and targets. Actions are pretty straightforward and are really only useful when combined with targets. Some actions in vim are listed below for reference.

• d: delete
• y: yank (copy)
• c: change
• v: select

Targets in vim are one or two character combinations. I’ve listed some of the most common targets I use below.

• iw: in word
• t: to the character before the next character entered
• f: to the next character entered
• $: to end of line
  

Combining actions and targets results in some interesting scenarios:

• ciw: change in word. Whatever the word under the cursor, remove it entirely and put me in insert mode.
• diw: delete in word. Delete the entire word currently under the cursor.
• ct.: change to the next period. Helpful for changing the name of an object, but not the method called on it.
• ct(: change to the next open paren. Helpful for changing the name of a method.
• df): delete to next close paren. Helpful for deleting entire method calls.
  
• yiw: yank in word. Yank the entire word under the cursor.
• d$ or D: delete to end of line
• c$ or C: change to end of line
• y$: yank to end of line

Do you use vim? Why or why not? If you do, what interesting ways do you use vim’s targets?