What are some alternatives of vim-surround

[Devin Weaver]

I use vim-surround so much that it has become an essential part of my Vim experience. I will continue to use it with gusto. But it does garner a question and that the facilities it provides are rather common in editing source code in general which leads me to wonder what are the "vim --clean" ways to perform the same actions that vim-surround offers.

Say I run Vim on a device where getting a git clone of the plugin difficult. Maybe it only has access to its own config and doesn't have a user accessible file system or something. What kinds of vanilla commands could be done to simulate what vim-surround does?

And if there isn't a clean alternative shouldn't the facilities vim-surround offeres be built into the base executable to begin with? I find it hard to believe we never needed to surround text in Vim prior to Tpope's amazing plugin. There has to have been more basic ways to accomplish such.

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[Tim Chase]

On 2023-04-18 07:29, 'Devin Weaver' via vim_use wrote:
> leads me to wonder what are the "vim --clean" ways to perform the
> same actions that vim-surround offers.

vim-surround offers a number of features, some easier to replicate,
others more challenging.

I commonly use

c<motion/object>'<c-r>"'<esc>

to wrap <motion/object> in quotes, using control+r followed by
double-quote to enter the text of the most recent deletion/yank.
It's not repeatable with "." (well, it is, but it repeats the
original replacement, not with the second text). However you can
record a macro if you need to redo that. I can do the same sort
of thing if I'm using tags, things like

caw<a href="#target"><c-r>"</a><esc>

to wrap the current link in an HTML <a> element.

For large numbers of changes, I tend to switch to using :g or :s
commands

:g/pattern/-pu='<p>'|+pu='</p>'

:%s@pattern@<a href="#target">&</a>@g

rather than trying to do one and then "."-repeat subsequent ones.

-tim

[Christian Brabandt]

On Di, 18 Apr 2023, Tim Chase wrote:

> On 2023-04-18 07:29, 'Devin Weaver' via vim_use wrote:
> > leads me to wonder what are the "vim --clean" ways to perform the
> > same actions that vim-surround offers.
>
> vim-surround offers a number of features, some easier to replicate,
> others more challenging.
>
> I commonly use
>
> c<motion/object>'<c-r>"'<esc>
>
> to wrap <motion/object> in quotes, using control+r followed by
> double-quote to enter the text of the most recent deletion/yank.
> It's not repeatable with "." (well, it is, but it repeats the
> original replacement, not with the second text).

If you use the small delete register, it is dot-repeatable. So for e.g.
quoting a single word, cw'<c-r>-' works quite well, which for me is the
main surround use case.


Best,
Christian
--
Konsequent ist nur der, der sich selber mit den Umständen wandelt.
-- Winston Spencer Churchill

[Tim Chase]

On 2023-04-19 14:35, Christian Brabandt wrote:
> On Di, 18 Apr 2023, Tim Chase wrote:

> > c<motion/object>'<c-r>"'<esc>
[snip]

> > It's not repeatable with "." (well, it is, but it repeats the
> > original replacement, not with the second text).
>
> If you use the small delete register, it is dot-repeatable.

Strange in its inconsistency, that one would remember that part of
the source-text was from a register while the other doesn't.

Is there documentation on why this difference? I poked around at

:help "-
:help i_CTRL-R (and following on its variants)
:help .
:help simple-change

but didn't see anything noting this small-delete peculiarity.

-tkc

[Christian Brabandt]

On Mi, 19 Apr 2023, Tim Chase wrote:

> Strange in its inconsistency, that one would remember that part of
> the source-text was from a register while the other doesn't.
>
> Is there documentation on why this difference? I poked around at
>
> :help "-
> :help i_CTRL-R (and following on its variants)
> :help .
> :help simple-change
>
> but didn't see anything noting this small-delete peculiarity.

Well, it was a small annoyance of me in particular :)
https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/7527

You are right, it's not documented. Do you have an idea on how to
improve the documentation?


Best,
Christian
--
Die Jugend ist etwas Wundervolles. Es ist eine wahre Schande, daß man
sie an Kinder vergeudet.
-- George Bernard Shaw

[Romain Lafourcade]

I have gathered a bunch of native alternatives to some of Surround's features in this gist: https://gist.github.com/romainl/ca742f241457b8609836202fe05ee5c0 for the fun of it.