How to quickly remove a pair of parentheses, brackets, or braces in Vim?
VimVim Problem Overview
In Vim, if I have code such as (in Ruby):
anArray << [anElement]
and my cursor is on the first [, I can hop to ] with the % key, and I can delete all the content between the [] pair with d%, but what if I just want to delete the [ and ] leaving all the remaining content between the two. In other words, what's the quickest way to get to:
anArray << anElement
Vim Solutions
Solution 1 - Vim
Using the Surround plugin for Vim, you can eliminate surrounding delimiters with ds<delimeter>.
To install it via Vundle plugin, add
Plugin 'tpope/vim-surround'
to your .vimrc file and run :PluginInstall.
Solution 2 - Vim
ma%x`ax (mark position in register a, go to matching paren, delete char, go to mark a, delete char).
EDIT:
%x``x does the same thing (thanks to @Alok for the tip).
Solution 3 - Vim
One can take advantage of the text objects that are built in into Vim
(see :help text-objects). The desired edit can be stated as a
sequence of the following three actions.
-
Cut the text inside the square brackets:
di[ -
Select the (empty) square brackets:
va[Alternatively, you can just select the character under the cursor and the one to the left of it, because the command from step 1 always puts the cursor on the closing bracket:
vh -
Paste the cut text over the selected brackets:
p
Altogether, it gives us the following sequence of Normal-mode commands:
di[va[p
or, when the alternative form of step 2 is used:
di[vhp
Solution 4 - Vim
If you have issues with the marks pointing to the first char of the line or with using % ...
di[vhp
works as well... It deletes matching [] brackets, when the cursor is anywhere inside. '[' can be replaced by '{' or '(' .
Solution 5 - Vim
The other answers work fine if you want to delete delimiters one line at a time.
If on the other hand you want to remove a function and it's delimiters from the entire file use:
:%s/function(\(.*\))/\1/g
which replaces function(arguments) with arguments everywhere in the file.
Solution 6 - Vim
You can use d% while your cursor is on the bracket/parentheses.