Question

In Vim, I keep finding myself desiring a keystroke to rewrite the rest of some parameter list. For example, in the following Python function:

def myfun(a, b=12, c=(1,2,3), d=15):
    pass

I wish to replace the c=(1,2,3), d=15 with e=12. The keystroke ci( allows me to replace everything inside the entire parameter list, but I find that I often want to retain some prefix of the Vim text-object. In general, I’d assume this keystroke I’m searching for would be useful in the context of replacing final parameters of function calls as well as definitions.

A desirable answer to this question would apply to quoted strings, [] blocks and other text objects too. Note that I understand all about text-objects as answered in “How to select between brackets (or quotes or …) in Vim?“.

Both @pb2q and @romainl give good search shortcuts, but they require me to visually find the end of the enclosing block to devise a search which is unambiguous in terms of any other garbage which is in the block (e.g. think nested function calls). In particular, I often find myself wanting this when I have nested parenthesis inside the parenthesis set I want to manipulate. The answer I really want is analogous to ci) or ca) which is entirely conceptually based on the nearest enclosing bracketing ) and deals entirely gracefully with other nested ) blocks.

Answer 1

There are a bunch of commands starting with ] that go to the end of some kind of structure, and respect nesting. ]) to go to the end of a parenthesized block, ]} to go to the end of a braced block, ]/ to go to the end of a C comment (/*...*/ style). Use [ in place of ] to go to the beginning instead of the end.

So to do the replacement of your c=(1,2,3), d=15 type c]).

The complete list of these commands is listed under :help various-motions. Unfortunately there isn’t one for blocks delimited by brackets, because [[ and ]] already had a different meaning in classical vi, and vim has defined ][ and [] to fit nicely with those.