Operators

Operators in Vim are used to change, delete, or otherwise operate on text. There are many operators available in Vim, and you can even create your own. For now, we’re going to focus on the most useful ones.

You can use the following operators in Vim:

• d for deleting text
• c for changing text — the same as deleting, but it drops you into insert mode afterwards
• y for yanking text
• gq for ‘formatting’ text — by default, this hard-wraps text to a certain number of characters
• < and > for indenting and dedenting text respectively

Now, from the previous section, we already know that there exists a text object ap` that means “a paragraph”. There’s a few paragraphs in the editor — let’s experiment using the operators above to act on each of the paragraphs.