How do I change until the next underscore in VIm?

Question

If I have this text in vim, and my cursor is at the first character:

www.foo.com

I know that I can do:

cw to change up to the first period, because a word (lowercase w) ends at any punctuation OR white space
cW to change the whole address, because a Word (uppercase w) ends only at whitespace

Now, what if I have this:

stupid_method_name

and want to change it to this?

awesome_method_name

Both cw and cW change the whole thing, but I just want to change the fragment before the underscore.

My fallback technique is c/_, meaning 'change until you hit the next underscore in a search,' but for me, that also causes all underscores to be highlighted as search terms, which is slightly annoying.

Is there a specifier like w or W that doesn't include underscores?

I do want search terms to be highlighted most of the time; just not when I use search as a movement. (I also just asked this question: http://superuser.com/questions/244042/is-it-possible-to-not-trigger-my-normal-search-highlighting-when-using-search-as) — Nathan Long, Feb 10 '11 at 14:36

doubleface · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-10T17:11:18.680

116

You can do cf_. f won't highlight the searched character.

You can also do ct_ if you don't want to include the _.

edited Feb 10 '11 at 17:11

answered Feb 10 '11 at 14:44

doubleface

1,276
1
9
4

3

This is also incredibly extendable and therefore powerful. I'm guessing you can put any character after the f or t and it will go to the next (or prev for caps) occurrence. Thanks. – Heather Nov 09 '17 at 13:16
12

Mnemonic: change 'til.
i.e. ct_ can be remembered as "change 'til underscore".
– François Leblanc Apr 04 '18 at 20:30

score 82 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '11 at 15:19

82

Put this in your .vimrc:

set iskeyword-=_

Then _ will be treated as a word boundary (though not a WORD boundary), and cw could be used to just change "awesome", and cW to change the whole thing.

See:

:help iskeyword

and

:help word

for more info.

answered Feb 10 '11 at 15:19

frabjous

11,007

10

It's great to know that I can define my own word boundaries, but after some thought, I think the best solution is ct_ as doubleface says below, since it's concise and is default vim behavior. – Nathan Long Mar 02 '11 at 12:01
2

I like this one, but it breaks my syntax color coding in php. – Aaron Surrain Mar 16 '17 at 18:05
How can I unset or toggle this? – Behe Sep 05 '19 at 09:05
I don't understand how come it took me so long to suffer through not having this directive set :) thanks – helvete Jan 15 '23 at 19:55

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 24 '15 at 23:17

camelcasemotion is a pretty handy vim plugin that allows you to move through words when using underscore or camelcase notation. Using this plugin you can place a comma in front of many of the traditional vim motion commands which will allow you to treat words in underscore or camelcase notation as full words.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 14 '19 at 08:50

1

As a summary of all previous answers:

There is no specifier to exclude _

You can do cf_. The searched character (_ here) will be included in the replaced string.
You can also do ct_ if you don't want to include the searched character (_ here).

f and t won't highlight the searched character in the file, unlike /.
f and t allows to search for one character
/ will allow for a pattern or a longer string , and will not include it, like t

answered Nov 14 '19 at 08:50

Mat M

139

If you intend to add more information to an answer, just extend / modify it. Do not copy its content and post it as an own answer. This is plagiarism. – dirdi Nov 14 '19 at 10:03
@dirdi I agree. I tried to edit the first answer, but it was rejected and suggested to post on my own. – Mat M Nov 14 '19 at 14:19

How do I change until the next underscore in VIm?

4 Answers4