s shortcut20 September 20
If you have used vim for quite some time you are probably familiar
with all the different ways to change text. There’s c for
change, d for delete which make up the bread and butter for
normal mode editing operators. Out of these two commands spring
shortcuts that are very organic and not very programmatically
sensible.
Most famously there is x which is equivalent to
dl. Or put simply, it deletes the character under the
cursor. It is almost always used more often than dl even
though dl is only one character more.
My guess is that the mental idea of dl does not flow
with how vim users tend to think when editing text. When vim users edit
in normal mode, we think of applying an operator to a movement. Which is
why most vim users tend to type d3w when they want to
delete three words rather than doing 3dw which is
synonymous with deleting one word three times. The l
movement means to move the cursor to the right by one character, and
together with d it means to delete until the next
character.
I don’t know about you, but that makes a lot less sense in my head
than the concept of deleting the character under my cursor. Since
dl is only one character longer than x and
only exists in the home row, my guess is that the speed trade-off is
minimal to none. I think x exists more as a mental shortcut
abstraction rather than merely a keyboard shortcut. There are other
commands such as D which deletes from your cursor to the
end of the line, and C which does the same, but puts you in
insert mode after. To me, these are more keyboard based shortcuts, and
have some sort of logic to them. The default $ for movement
to the end of the line is not conducive to typing flow. However, the
thought process is the same for D and d$.
The law of capitalising an operator to denote its operation to the
end of the line is somewhat universal in vim. This does not apply to
Y however, which is why the vim help page also recommends
you to remap it.
Much lesser known however, is s. I would categorise this
command as a mental keyboard shortcut which is a combination of both
being much faster than its alternative in keyboard flow as well as being
much simpler when it comes to mental effort required.
The s shortcut is short for cl. It deletes
the character under the cursor, then puts you in insert mode. I
personally urge any vim user that does not currently use this normal
mode command to force yourself to use it.
I have found that I find myself in situations where I need to use
s quite often when editing text. But before being familiar
with it, I would never have thought that cl was what I
needed to type, because to me cl makes less intuitive sense
in text editing terms. It means to change until the next character. But
that doesn’t sound like what I want to do.
Novice vim users would have used something like xi,
which is what I would have used. But xi is quite a bit
worse than s because both keys are off the home row.
Please force yourself to use the s shortcut (which I
think stands for “substitute”). You will feel quite a bit faster, trust
me.
Best Regards,
Philip