• String Example
• HTML example
• Deleting

Today, I find myself excited about evil-surround, an excellent Emacs package based on vim-surround by Tim Pope. And one that’s in Spacemacs (❤️) by default. It’s great for doing edits that have to do with surrounding characters such as:

• "double quotes"
• 'single quotes'
• [brackets]
• <p>tags</p>

String Example

Let’s say you have a string that looks like this.

var myString = "This is my string with double quotes.";

But you would rather it be a single-quoted string than a double-quoted one.

var myString = 'This is my string with double quotes.';

evil-surround to the rescue!

1. Put your cursor somewhere inside the double quoted string. (| is your cursor location.)

   var myString = "This is my stri|ng with double quotes.";

2. Type cs"' - That’s [c]hang [s]urrounding [”] double quotes to [’] single quotes

3. Profit (and try to not notice that the contents of the string no longer make sense)

   var myString = 'This is my stri|ng with double quotes.';

I think my favorite part about this is how minimal the cursor movement is. Your cursor can be anywhere inside of the double quotes!

HTML example

evil-surround can do more than just changing quotes, it always works with html.

Say you have this HTML.

<div>
  This is a div, but probably should have been a &lt;p&gt;
</div>

But you want it to look like this HTML.

<p>
  This is a div, but probably should have been a &lt;p&gt;
</p>

1. Put your cursor somewhere inside the double quoted string. (| is your cursor location)

   <div>
     This is a div,| but probably should have been a &lt;p&gt;
   </div>

2. Type cst<p> - That’s [c]hange [s]urrounding [t]ag to a [ <p> ]aragraph tag.

3. Profit (and also don’t notice that the contents of the tag no longer make sense)

   <p>
     This is a div,| but probably should have been a &lt;p&gt;
   </p>

Deleting

The previous examples were all about changing surrounding characters, but sometimes (especially in html), you want to get rid of surround characters. To do this, all you need to do is change the first character from [c]hange [d]elete.

1. Before

   <div>
     <div>Turns out I |don't (for whatever reason) need this inner div anymore.</div>
   </div>

2. dst - [d]elete [s]urrounding [t]ag

   <div>
     Turns out I |don't (for whatever reason) need this inner div anymore.
   </div>