This plugin provides custom text objects for selecting python functions or classes.
I don't believe that it depends on any other plugins or other weirdness. I run vim 7.3, but I tested it for about 30 seconds in 7.2 and nothing broke horribly.
The two new text object targets contained herein are c and f, describing classes and functions respectively.
As you might expect, this gives you the objects ac, ic, af, and if.
Unfortunately what exactly should constitute the "inner" and "outer" portions of a function or class is not entirely clear to me at this time. So for the moment, the only difference is that the outer objects include any trailing blank lines, while the inner ones do not. Watch this space for developments in this matter.
Actual usage should be pretty intuitive to anyone familiar with text objects.
With the cursor on any line inside of a function, vaf will visually select the entire function along with whatever blank lines that follow it.
And so on.
I'm still adjusting my expectations of what inner vs outer objects should do in this case so that behavior might change. I do know that outer should include decorators, so that's something I still need to do. I'm not really sure if there's ever a case for working on the actual insides of a function, as in everything but the definition.
Nested functions are a little squirelly at the moment.
But in common, garden-path cases, I think this pretty much works.
Since this only really applies to python, I put pythontextobj.vim in ~/.vim/ftplugin/python/.
Though, if you wanted to put it in ~/.vim/plugin/, I don't suppose that would actually break anything, and perhaps it might even be useful for some other language.
A lot of this code was lifted from Alfredo Deza's chapa. Austin Taylor's indentobj was also informative, but I don't think I stole anything from him.