Why "vie" selects the entired file?

Question

I'm trying to type "vie", "cie" and "die", and their behaviors are both operating on the entired file, i.e. "vie" selects the whole file text, "cie" and "die" deletes the whole file text, what's the Intuitive explanation for this ?

Answer 1

The e is for "entire".

This behavior for ie has probably originated from Vim plug-in kana/vim-textobj-entire, which defines text objects ie and ae for the entire buffer.

Text objects typically start with either i or a, where i stands for "inside" (usually the text object without including delimiters) and a for "around" (including delimiters around the text object.)

Vim keybindings in VS Code include a few extras (from base Vim) that come from popular plug-ins (such as vim-surround, etc.) They probably included ie from this plug-in as well.

Documentation for the VS Code Vim extension mentions vim-textobj-entire explicitly, together with all other Vim plug-ins the extension emulates.