tilchanging a word in vim

The c key starts a chord to change something. This is super useful for changing the word under the cursor. cw will change from the current position until the end of the next word, and ciw will change the whole word under the cursor (read: change in word).

This, combined with other movements can lead to very quick changes. One I’ve found quite useful is ci" which changes the contents of a quoted string, and ca" (change all "quoted) to include the quote marks themselves. Or when working in prose, cis will change the current sentence and cip the current paragraph.

Sometimes a change command is hard to think about first, or the area you want to change is subtly different from what the change command would do. Replace c with v to get a similar visual motion (like v3w for 3 words), muck about, then press c to change.

Changing the whole line (but keeping the indentation) is simply cc.