How do I change until the next underscore in VIm?

Question

If I have this text in vim, and my cursor is at the first character:

www.foo.com

I know that I can do:

• cw to change up to the first period, because a word (lowercase w) ends at any punctuation OR white space
• cW to change the whole address, because a Word (uppercase w) ends only at whitespace

Now, what if I have this:

stupid_method_name

and want to change it to this?

awesome_method_name

Both cw and cW change the whole thing, but I just want to change the fragment before the underscore.

My fallback technique is c/_, meaning 'change until you hit the next underscore in a search,' but for me, that also causes all underscores to be highlighted as search terms, which is slightly annoying.

Is there a specifier like w or W that doesn't include underscores?

Answer 1

You can do cf_. f won't highlight the searched character.

You can also do ct_ if you don't want to include the _.

Answer 2

Put this in your .vimrc:

set iskeyword-=_

Then _ will be treated as a word boundary (though not a WORD boundary), and cw could be used to just change "awesome", and cW to change the whole thing.

See:

:help iskeyword

and

:help word

for more info.