How to change text inside quotes or brackets in Vim

Winter hours start on Monday, and the shop's website still says it's open until ten. The cursor is in the middle of the opening hours in the config file. You want everything between the quotes gone and the new hours typed in, without counting characters or hunting for the closing quote.

Read ci" as "change inside quotes". The last character names what to look inside, so ci( changes what's between parentheses, ci{ between braces, ci[ between square brackets and cit between an HTML tag and its closing tag. Single quotes and backticks work too, with ci' and ci`.

The cursor doesn't even have to be inside yet. If it's earlier on the line, Vim finds the next pair after it, so ci( at the start of price(order) changes order, and cit at the start of a line of HTML changes the text in that line's tag. The shop's specials list is a good place to try it.

Swap the c for d to delete without typing anything after. di" empties the string and leaves the quotes, which is what you want before pasting something in. da" reads as "delete a string" and takes the quotes too, along with the space after them. When pairs sit inside each other, Vim picks the innermost pair of the kind you asked for.