Emacs. Change inner/outer like in Vim

If you’re a former Vim user there is one feature I couldn’t find in any other editors.

Not sure what is the proper name of it but let’s call it change inside something.

Example (| - is a cursor):

function() {
  return 'hello |world'
}

If I press ci' the result is going to be:

function() {
  return '|'
}

or ci{:

function() {|}

That’s incredibly useful feature because I don’t really need to think where my cursor is. I just place it somewhere around the place I need to remove and press that magical keybinding.

There is no such built-in function in Emacs. And this one is probably the only feature I miss the most.

For some time I’ve been using expand-region by Magnar Sveen which is a different thing really. It just expands a selection by some logical semantic blocks and can be used as a replacement to that ci'. But still I need to think how many times I should call that expand-region function before the thing I need is selected.

So today I discovered change-inner.el by already mentioned Magnar Sveen. It uses expand-region internally and does exactly what ci<symbol> does.

Bindings suggested in the package readme, M-i / M-o, are pretty easy to used to.

So if you ever missed that change inner/outer Vim feature give this lib a shot.