Basic Overview of the Surround Plugin for Vim

Surround is a useful Vim plugin when hand-editing HTML or XML. The plugin can be downloaded via Github or the Vim website and installed by copying the /plugin/surround.vim file to your ~/.vim/plugin/ directory. A few of its basic commands are as follows. Note that each command is entered from within the text to be surrounded:

Adding Surroundings

Generally, the cs or ys commands can be used to add surroundings.

Add Surrounding or Puncation to Word:

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ysiw<tag>
csw<tag>

Add Surrounding to Highlighted Text From Within Visual Mode:

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VS<tag>

Add Surrounding or Punctuation to Line:

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yss<tag>

Add Surrounding to Line, Place it on a New Line, and Indent It:

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ySs<tag>
ySS<tag>

Changing Surroundings

Surroundings can be changed with the cs command.

Change Surrounding :

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cst<newtag>

Change Surrounding Puncuation, in this Case Changing a Double Quote to a Single Quote:

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cs"'

Deleting Surroundings

Delete Innermost Surrounding :

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dst

Delete Surrounding Quotes (Also works with parentheses, brackets, etc.):

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ds"

Delete Text Within a

While this isn't a function of Surround.vim, I find it somewhat relevant to the above operations. Luckily, it’s built into Vim.

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dit