Question

One of Vim's great strengths is object-select, offering quick manipulation of content inside words, paragraphs and assorted delimiters.

For example,

vi{

will select everything inside a pair of {} braces.

Is there any equivalent functionality for selecting a here document or heredoc:

<<<HTML
    ....
    ....
HTML;

Based on ErichBSchulz's answer I came up with the following for an heredoc inner select:

nmap <F6> ?<<<<CR>w*kV?<<<<CR>j

?<<<<CR>w    " find beginning tag (after <<<)
*k           " find matching end tag and go up 1 line
V            " enter visual mode
?<<<<CR>j    " find beginning tag and go down 1 line
Was it helpful?

Solution

Thinking about the earlier posts and trying to take them a step closer. This wont be 100% reliable (ie will break if the starting tag occurs within the heredoc but something like:

?<<< "find begining
w    " go to starting tag
*    " find starting tag
v    " enter visual mode (could use Upper V to do an 'ambientish' object select 
n    " find end tag
e    " optional include end tag

Edit: Ken has improved the sequence as above, so I suggest you use his better key mapping for an 'inner' heredoc select:

nmap <F6> ?<<<<CR>w*kV?<<<<CR>j

(this is based on php style heredocs)

OTHER TIPS

For selecting heredoc's I usually place the cursor at the first line, over the heredoc identifier and press V*

V will start a line selection, and * will start a search, going to the next match of the identifier, the end of the heredoc...

A <<'' heredoc terminated by an empty line is easy, if you're already at the start (?<<^M^M): v} selects from here until the empty line.

Otherwise, in your example the best I can think of is v/^HTML.

There's this plugin that let's you define your own text objects.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2100

I imagine it would be nice to define one so you could say 'yih' (yank in heredoc) so you don't have to explicitly go to the start.

Note I haven't fooled around with this myself.

If you just want a visual select you could.

 nnoremap <leader>ih ?HTML<cr>V/HTML<cr>
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