quickly kill and then yank parts of a program

Question

I very often encounter the problem that I have to cut out a part of an expression and need to copy it somerhere else. For example the following python line:

courtage_text = data["expose"]["brokerage"]["courtage"]["text"].lower()

What I want to do is cut out

data["expose"]["brokerage"]["courtage"]["text"]

What I do very often is to move the point to the beginning of what I want to cut out and then do M-f a couple times to move where I want and then C-w

Is there a faster way of selecting what I want? I think this is a common problem and relevant to other languages as well.

Answer 1

If using evil you can move point to the d and type dt.

Another way I often do stuff like this in evil is move point to the d and then go in to visual state with v then move point to where I want (usually using ace-jump) and then type x

Some advantages of the 2nd way are:

• You don't have to bother thinking of just the right character to put after the dt of the first method. You could just jump to the approximate location and move your visual selection.

• It works for skipping multiple instances of that character (like if you had multiple periods in between the one you wanted to delete until).

• It works across multiple lines.

The advantage of the 1st way is that it's quicker, as long as you don't have to jump too far or think too much about exactly which character you want to stop at.

Answer 2

Here's the simplest way to do it that I found. With the point to the beginning of what you want to cut. You are going to use the zap-to-char command with an argument. Use C-u 4 to give it an argument of 4 and then use M-z to call zap-to-char. Enter ] <RET>. That should work.

Answer 3

I have shortcuts for moving between whitespaces:

(bind-key "M-o"
  (lambda ()
    "Move to next whitespace."
    (interactive "^")
    (skip-chars-forward "^\n\t ") (skip-chars-forward "\n\t ")
    ))
(bind-key "M-y"
   (lambda ()
    "Move to previous whitespace."
    (interactive "^")
    (skip-chars-backward "\n\t ") (skip-chars-backward "^\n\t ")
    ))

In your example, there is a whitespace before data[..., so I can first move to . (e.g., by going to the end of line and move backward few words) and then jump to data with the above shortcut.