I am familiar with how I can change, delete, yank etc inside or around various text objects.
I would like to jump to the start or end of the current sentence, or any other text object I currently in.
Is there some command to do this?
There is no generic command for that.
That said, doing v<text-object><Esc> leaves the cursor at the end of the text object, and doing v<text-object>o<Esc> leaves the cursor at the start. vip<Esc> or vipo<Esc> are not so bad.
See :help v_o.
If you feel adventurous, you may consider using that base technique to build your own custom motions.
Related
How can I select different portions of multiple non-contiguous lines and replace them with the same/different text?
Example: Let's say my buffer looks like this-
Roses are reed,
Violets aree blue,
Sugaar is sweet,
And so are you,
I want to change in 1st line the 3rd word ('reed') to 'red, yellow and green', in 2nd line 'aree' to 'are', in 3rd line 'Sugaar' to 'Sugar and molasses' and in 4th line 'you,' to 'you.'.
Say my cursor is at 'R' of 'Roses'. I want to select all four of these wrongs at once and nothing other the wrongs. After I'm done selecting I want to be able to move to 'reed' by pressing some key (say Ctrl+j), then after changing I want to be able to press some key (say Ctrl+j) and move the next visual selection which is 'aree'.
Is there any plugin that does this?
There are multiple cursors plugins that attempt to create parallel editing functionality seen in other editors to Vim (which is difficult). If I understand your use case right, that wouldn't help here, though, because all places would be edited in the same way (so reed, areee, etc. would all be replaced with the same red).
Instead, what you seem to be asking for, is a way to search for all wrongly spelled words, and then edit them one by one, individually. You can do this with standard search, using regular expression branches:
/reed\|areee\|Sugaar\|you,/
You can then simply press next to go to the next match after you're done. Note that the branches have to be unique (so I searched for you, instead of simply ,). Adding word boundaries (\<reed\> instead of reed) is a good idea, too.
plugin recommendations
multiple cursors is a famous plugin for parallel editing
My SearchAlternatives plugin lets you add the current word under the cursor as a search branch with a quick (<Leader>+ by default) key mapping. (However, if you're already on the word, why not correct it immediately?)
My SpellCheck plugin populates the quickfix list with all misspelled words and locations. You can then use quickfix navigation (e.g. :cnext) to quickly go to each. The plugin also offers mappings to fix spelling errors directly from the quickfix list.
Is there a shortcut in vim to delete from the current cursor to the end of the sentence?
cursor
v
This is half a sentence. My cursor is here, but I would
like to delete to this period. I do not want to delete this part.
^
delete from cursor to here
Imagine my cursor is somewhere on the text that says My cursor is here,. How can I delete from this line all the way (and including) that next .?
Though there's no exact motion for that, there are several possibilities:
The ) motion deletes the remainder of the sentence, but that also includes the whitespace after the period.
If there were no hard line break, you could use the useful f motion (which only works in the current line, unless you install a plugin): f. This is also useful if you want to keep the period: t.
The most general motion is search via /. You need to search for a literal period (\.), and to include it, move to the end (/e) of it: /\./e<Enter>.
All of these have to be appended to the d "delete" command, which takes a {motion}.
Learn how to look up commands and navigate the built-in :help (here, :help motion.txt in particular); it is comprehensive and offers many tips. You won't learn Vim as fast as other editors, but if you commit to continuous learning, it'll prove a very powerful and efficient editor.
you should combine d with motion command. for your example, this will be d/\.<Ret>
This visual-mode editing may help you understand what actually happen:
v/\.<Ret>ld
I am using the kana / vim-textobj-user for defining some custom user objects but the problem is I can't jump over them : case in point
let's say I am using the same indent text object which is mapped by ai and ii
I want to jump around the text in normal mode something like ]i and [i
currently I am using a very hacky way of selecting and exiting visual mode
So is there a simple way to do that and have some kind of mappings for all the other user text-objects as well .
Something like ]{text-object}
I am using the kana / vim-textobj-user for defining some custom user objects
[...]
let's say I am using the same indent text object which is mapped by ai and ii
I want to jump around the text in normal mode something like ]i and [i
Vim has a bunch of built-in commands like ]m, [M, etc. So I thought you meant ]i/[i to move the cursor to the next/previous text object. If so, vim-textobj-user supports both selecting and moving to a text object since its first release. But it's not automatic. At least you have to declare what keys (such as ]i/[i) to be used for the commands.
But I wonder about the following sesntence:
currently I am using a very hacky way of selecting and exiting visual mode
So you typed like vaio<Esc> and vai<Esc>? What you want to do is to move the cursor to the first/last line of the text object under the cursor? If so, vim-textobj-user currently doesn't provide API to define such commands.
In this case, it is probably possible to automate defining key mappings like nmap ]i vai<Esc>. But it seems to be fragile and overrides several built-in commands.
Text objects are only for applying a command (e.g. gU) or visually selecting an area of text. Motions over / to the next occurrence are highly related, but different commands. I think the vim-textobj-user plugin only provides the former, but not the latter.
My CountJump plugin is quite similar, and provides commands to set up both text objects and jumps based on regular expressions.
How would you use VIM to delete a word group, which includes white space characters, but is a standard grouping you would want to access when scripting? Specifically, when you have your cursor over some part of the following text, how would delete help="initialize, lines, h2, derivs, tt, history", from below. Maybe one would need to create specific mappings. But on the other hand, it seems pretty natural to want to access text like this if you are using VIM to edit scripting programs.
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("task", help="initialize, lines, h2, derivs, tt, history", default='yes')
Vim has a variety of text objects built-in, e.g. da" deletes quoted text (including the quotes; di" keeps the quotes). See :help text-objects for more information.
There are some plugins, e.g. textobj-user - Support for user-defined text objects and my own CountJump plugin that make it easy to define your own, "special" text objects. Also, you'll find many such text objects on vim.org. Based on your example, argtextobj.vim - Text-object like motion for arguments may be exactly what you need here.
If you are inside the " you want to delete, I would use:
di"diW
If you were above help=, I would use something like:
d/defEnter
to remove everything until you encounter default, followed by a few x, and left-wise motion, to remove the remaining characters.
I don't really think a new mapping is needed, but your experience may vary.
What makes sense from Vim's perspective and according to its design goals is to provide small and generic elements and a few rules to combine them in order to achieve higher level tasks. It does quite a good job, I'd say, with its numerous text-objects and motions but we always have to repeat domain-specific tasks and that's exactly where Vim's extensibility comes into play. It is where users and plugin authors fill the gap with custom mappings/object/functions and… plugins.
It is fairly easy, for example, to record a macro and map it for later reuse. Or create a quick and dirty custom text-object…
The following snippet should work with your sample.
xnoremap aa /\v["'][,)]/e<CR>o?\v\s+\w+\=<CR>
onoremap aa :normal vaa<CR>
With it, you can do daa, caa, yaa and vaa from anywhere within that argument.
Obviously, this solution is extremely specific and making it more generic would most certainly involve a bit more thought but there are already relatively smart solutions floating around, as in Ingo's answer.
[Edit: after reading comments I realize that the Surround plugin is adequate for my needs after all, so I'll leave this question for purely academic purposes to gain a better understanding of vimscript's inner workings]
I'd like to make adding/deleting tags, quotes, braces, and other symmetrical text structures easier to do in Vim, and I find the surround.vim plugin a little too quirky and specialized for my needs.
What I really need is more generally a "mirrored" input mode and "mirrored" deletion mode, whereby I could visually select a block of text, then type onto or delete from both ends of the selection at once. As an example workflow, I'd like to:
select the word hello
hit some keystroke combo to enter "mirror mode"
type "
my text now says "hello"
In this example I only typed one character at each end, but it's important that in step three I could have typed many characters, not just one, for instance I should be able to type <b> to produce <b>hello<b> (I still would need to manually add the / in the closing tag, which I'm OK doing).
So is this even possible in Vim? Could someone provide a broad outline of functions that would be involved in the solution? Specifically, I don't know how to intercept text as it's being inserted and then alter the location where it appears so that it's tacked onto the beginning and ending of the selection block instead of the cursor location. And ditto for deletion.
Well, the behavior you describe is exactly what Surround does:
select the word hello
hit S
type "
my text now says "hello"
The difference with what you ask is the "live updating" or "live mirroring" which I have no idea how to do. You could probably take a look at SnipMate or UltiSnips for that part.