Surrounding multiple lines with the same tag

[jasonlong]

Apologies if this has already been answered, but I didn't find anything matching exactly this after some searching here.

I know the common way of doing this is with macros, but I'm curious if there's a "mini" way.

Say you have three lines of varying length:

first item
second item
third item

and you want to do two things:

1. Wrap the whole block in a <ul> tag
2. Wrap each item in a <li> tag

The first one is easy enough with sat, but I've never landed on a nice way to do the second.

The final result would be

<ul>
  <li>first item</li>
  <li>second item</li>
  <li>third item</li>
</ul>

[echasnovski]

Hi, Jason! Thanks for using 'mini.nvim'! It means a lot!

I know the common way of doing this is with macros, but I'm curious if there's a "mini" way.

Well, I'd say that the best approach in this particular case is to use dot-repeat and _ textobject (which represents "line"). That is:

• Put cursor on any column of "first item" line.
• Press sa_t followed by li and <CR>. It should transform the line into desired one.
• Press j. until completed.

---

But, judging by "The first one is easy enough with sat", you prefer respect_selection_type = true. This makes things a bit not straightforward. Mostly because there are conflicting use cases: for <ul> it would be better to respect selection type, but for <li> - not. The second part would require having a textobject which represents line but is itself charwise (not linewise).

But fear not, as there is a "mini" way! There are 'mini.ai' to create textobjects and gen_ai_spec.line() in 'mini.extra' which can achieve exactly this. So the use case can be resolved with something like this:

• Set up 'mini.ai' module with custom textobject:

  require('mini.ai').setup({
    custom_textobjects = {
      L = require('mini.extra').gen_ai_spec.line(),
    }
  })

• Follow steps from the first approach but use iL textobject instead of _.

(Full disclosure: I hoped that "forcing" charwise mode with sav_t (notice v) would work, but apparently it is not really compatible with _ textobject)

---

I'd personally would go the first route. This makes wrapping paragraph with <ul> not as straightforward, but as this is a usually a less common task, should be fine.

[jasonlong]

Wow thanks for the great explanation, @echasnovski! I can't believe I wasn't familiar w/ the _ text object. That changes everything. That first method seems great to me, but I will also dig into mini.ai and mini.extra.

Keep up the great work on this project! 🤘🏼