Forced motions

You are probably familiar with the usual verb + noun/motion grammar of vim. E.g. dw is delete word and d% deleted from the cursor to the next matching delimiter.

One gotcha/annoyance with d% is that it is a charwise motion, which might not be what you want.

Enter forced motions, where you basically enter an adjective between the verb and the noun. The relevant adjectives here are

• v charwise
• V linewise
• <C-v> blockwise

So if like me your goal was to delete all the lines delimited by a matching {} then you would have wanted dV%.

For more information, see :h forced-motion.