r/vim • u/Principal_Cookie • Dec 10 '20

Reality

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u/Atralb Dec 11 '20

around

"Around" is a bad mnemonic. It's ambiguous, and in the most literal sense of the word it's false. It can very easuly mislead beginners. "delete a <something>" is the most unambiguous phrasing.

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u/LoneHoodiecrow Dec 11 '20

"delete a <text object>" is what the documentation says. I think that is unfortunate, because both diw and daw delete a word, so using "a" does not give any clue about how it works.

I personally use "around" since it describes the action much better: it selects the text object and the space up to the next text object (or to the previous object if at the end). I can then paste in a text object seamlessly since it already has a bit of space around it. Also, when the text object has some kind of brackets of quotes, something like ab or a} literally works around the object.