Surrounding multiple times

[Chinggis6]

Thanks, the plugin is great, I use yss often, and like how the difference between pair characters is implemented (in ] and [ for example).
But, what to do when I need to surround the line with double, triple or N amount of characters?
I tried 2yss] and yss2] to surround the line with double brackets ([[line]]) (which is happening frequently when dealing with org mode in emacs or wikimarkup on wikipedia) but it didn't work (obviously). Any solutions?

[jpassaro]

you could do yss]ysa]], which surrounds the line with brackets then surrounds those brackets with another pair of brackets. You could probably write a function / plugin that takes a count and interprets it this way: yss<char> followed by count-1 applications of ysa<char><char>.

Wonder if such an extension would be useful enough to include in the plugin... Personally I don't need to do this too often.

[offchan42]

@jpassaro I do this a lot!
For example, when in markdown, you want to surround things with ``` to make it into a code block.
In Python, you want to surround things with """ to make it into a block comment.

[offchan42]

Currently, I map it like this: offchan42/vimrc@ed9b042

So S3" would surround things with 3 double quotes. It's not using vim-surround plugin's engine at all. I think it might be possible that vim-surround should allow counts.

[offchan42]

And a lot of times, I want to surround things with arbitrary text like HEY my text HEY.
It should be obvious for the vim-surround maintainer to implement this because it's like surrounding with tag but no <> symbol.
The desired key should be something like ysw T (for text) followed by HEY. Of course, this T key can be chosen, there are literally hundreds of keys we can substitute in.

[jottr]

@tpope would it be possible to implement above feature somehow?
Or are there any workarounds to get to the desired behaviour?
This is especially interesting when editing markdown files.
See #202 and #15

[boardfish]

Totally up for this. Right now, the required motion is ysiw*l. for a single word. In other cases, things get complex enough that you might need to make a complex text selection twice.

[Chinggis6]

@boardfish you might consider using . (dot) to repeat the command until we have numbers ;-)

[Chinggis6]

^ oh it doesn't work even with vim-repeat. :-(

though ysw (unlike yss) worked partially... that is it prompts for a character input to surround the word with (instead of remembering the previous character)

[rattletat]

Totally opt for this feature. Would fit more nicely into vim's language.
3dsb to delete 3 bracket surroundings for example.
PS: vim-repeat is also not working that way. For me dsb 2. does not work.

[rjmccabe3701]

@off99555 does this help?

"Code block for markdown
 autocmd FileType markdown let b:surround_45 = "```\n\r\n```"

"Block comment for python
 autocmd FileType python let b:surround_45 = "\"\"\"\n\r\n\"\"\""

[trapier]

Thanks @rjmccabe3701! With that config the one-line case is covered by yss-. I wish ysip didn't remove indentation, but that seems to be default surround behavior.

I edit a lot of Jira markup in vim, so I'm gonna go wild and set this up for {code}, {noformat}, and the like.

[michaelfresco]

For markdown code blocks, I use this to wrap ``` around my selection:

vmap <Leader>mc S続<esc>:%s/続/```<CR>

Though yss- with let b:surround_45 is much more elegant.

[naught101]

Something along these lines would be very useful for using writing **bold text** in markdown.

[qadzek]

Something along these lines would be very useful for using writing bold text in markdown.

This should work:

let b:surround_{char2nr('o')} = "**\r**"

Mnemonic: bOld.