Vim Tip of the Day: The Truth About Nouns

Nouns commonly refer to objects (“cat”, “house”), but Vim nouns typically indicate navigations in connection with some object and aren’t simple references (e.g. e = “end of the word”, w = “start of the next word”). This is a clue that there’s something funny about these “nouns.” It turns out that the nouns we employ when talking about text — words, paragraphs, and so on — aren’t exactly the nouns that Vim itself operates on, which is ranges. Whenever we describe an action via the Vim language in terms of nouns that make sense to us, Vim translates that into an implied character range. For instance, when you say e, Vim understands that to mean, “from here to the end of the word.” It then takes action on that range if you’ve also indicated a verb.

Why do we care about this? For one thing, sometimes, the nouns you are interested in are simple references but can’t be expressed as simple motions. You’d like to say “this paragraph,” and Vim should understand that you mean, “this paragraph which the cursor is in right now, of course.” In such cases, the noun we seek to manipulate is not expressible as a motion, but it is still a range, and Vim gives us a second kind of linguistic noun (in addition to motions) to indicate these, called “text objects.”

To use these, just point at the objects with the cursor, and then leverage the concepts “in” (i) and “around” (a) to manipulate them. For example, if you were referring to quoted text, in would indicate the text inside quotes, and around would indicate the text including the quotes. More examples:

Change in word = ciw
Delete around paragraph = dap (this one is handy!)
Delete in paragraph = dip (can also be used to collapse whitespace)
Yank (copy) sentence = yis
Change in parens = cib or ci( — either open or close paren works
Change in box = ci[
Change in quotes = ci"
Select in parens = vib (we’ll learn more about (v)isual mode later)
Change in tag = cit
etc.

Try other variations on your own!

Note that we use p and s here for paragraph and sentence, respectively, since { and ( refer to the actual delimiters in this case. Also, unlike the usual nouns (w, }, etc.), these “text objects” cannot be used on their own without verbs, since they aren’t navigations.

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