HTML can feel unwieldy and inefficient to edit. There are lots of great tools and alternate syntaxes that make this easier… but who wants to set up a whole framework and all the dependancies that come with that just to be more efficient. With a basic Vim command and the surround plugin you can greatly increase your productivity traversing and manipulating tags.
Say, for instance, you have:
<ul>
<li>something</li>
<li>something else</li>
</ul>
… and you want to make these list items links.
- Place your curser inside the list item
- Type
vit. This will visually (v) select the text inside (i) the surrounding tag (t). - Now type
s <a href="#" >and the surround plugin wraps the selected text with anchor tags
I find that the surround plugin is an excellent companion to the sparkup plugin.