Linewise inner tag without the tag lines?

Question

An example HTML, with the cursor where the brackets are:

<foo>
  <bar>
          baz
          quux
          []
  </bar>
</foo>

I would like to outdent the text inside <bar/>. Naturally, I try <it, but it turns out that it is everything inside <bar/> - including the newline after <bar>, and indent before </bar>. Thus, < pulls the entire <bar/> tag, not just the contents.

On the other hand, <i{ does the right thing in pretty much the same circumstance:

if (foo) {
    baz();
    quux();
    []
}

Does anyone have an idea how I can select just the three lines between, without the <bar> and </bar> lines, just like I can do inside the braces? The best I can come up with is vitkoj<; am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

You can use Operator-pending mode to define new text objects by having the mapping invoke Visual mode, and then select the text you want to operate on.

I'm not entirely sure what semantics you want here; the devil is in the details, as usual. But you could try the following:

:onoremap iT :<C-U>normal! vitbowV<CR>

And then <iT to unindent something.

To define the text to operate on it does vit to select the inner tag, backs up a word, moves to the beginning of the selection, then moves on a word, and then makes the selection linewise. This should suffice for most situations.

More details at :help omap-info.

Answer 2

You are right, vim treats tags differently. The plugin vim-indent-object will help you, you can do <ii with it to chance the indent of all lines inside the same indent block.