Question

Given this line of code in C:

printf('%3.0f\t%6.1f\n', fahr, ((5.0/9.0) * (fahr-32)));

Is there a way to delete or yank from the first bold parenthesis to its matching parenthesis? I thought about df), but that only will get you to just after the 9.0.

Is there a similar way to get vim to grab everything between matching braces, regardless of newlines?

Answer 1

Various Motions: %

The % command jumps to the match of the item under the cursor. Position the cursor on the opening (or closing) paren and use y% for yanking or d% for deleting everything from the cursor to the matching paren.

This works because % is a ‘motion command’, so it can be used anywhere vim expects such a command. From :help y:

['x]y{motion}       Yank {motion} text [into register x].  When no                     characters are to be yanked (e.g., 'y0' in column 1),                     this is an error when 'cpoptions' includes the 'E'                     flag. 

By default, ‘item’ includes brackets, braces, parens, C-style comments and various precompiler statements (#ifdef, etc.).

There is a plugin for ‘extended % matching’ that you can find on the Vim homepage.

You can read the documentation on % and related motion commands by entering :help various-motions in command mode.

object-select

There is another set of motion commands that you can use in Visual mode to select various text objects.

To solve your specific problem you would do the following:

printf('%3.0f\t%6.1f\n', fahr, ((5.0/9.0) * (fahr-32)));                                    ^ 

Let’s say your cursor is positioned at ^. Enter the following sequence to select the part you are looking for:

v2a) 

First v enters Visual mode, then you specify that you want to go 2 levels of parens up. Finally the a) selects ‘a block’. After that you can use d or x to delete, etc.

If you don’t want to include the outer parens, you can use ‘inner block’ instead:

v2i) 

See :help object-select for the complete list of related commands.