[Edit: after reading comments I realize that the Surround plugin is adequate for my needs after all, so I'll leave this question for purely academic purposes to gain a better understanding of vimscript's inner workings]
I'd like to make adding/deleting tags, quotes, braces, and other symmetrical text structures easier to do in Vim, and I find the surround.vim plugin a little too quirky and specialized for my needs.
What I really need is more generally a "mirrored" input mode and "mirrored" deletion mode, whereby I could visually select a block of text, then type onto or delete from both ends of the selection at once. As an example workflow, I'd like to:
- select the word hello
- hit some keystroke combo to enter "mirror mode"
- type "
- my text now says "hello"
In this example I only typed one character at each end, but it's important that in step three I could have typed many characters, not just one, for instance I should be able to type <b> to produce <b>hello<b> (I still would need to manually add the / in the closing tag, which I'm OK doing).
So is this even possible in Vim? Could someone provide a broad outline of functions that would be involved in the solution? Specifically, I don't know how to intercept text as it's being inserted and then alter the location where it appears so that it's tacked onto the beginning and ending of the selection block instead of the cursor location. And ditto for deletion.
