It has helped, but I'm still wishing there were more equivalents. This just seems to scratch the surface of what Vim can do in this area. If you find anything else that is helpful for this sort of editing task, please post it here...
I don't understand. Emacs blows vim away here. Of course, obviously both emacs and vim users are unaware of these symbolic modes. But Emacs modes are designed to have this idea of customizing the word, sentence, paragraph, and symbolic expression per language/syntax. And using the mark and region and operating on them with commands is exactly what's described in this vim article. That said, I didn't know that vim could do these things, either, because the default vim objects are lines, which are hideously crude and turned me off.
I'm not an emacs guru, but it feels especially sad to see that emacs grammar/syntax aware (emacs does a lot in this department) structures aren't used to provide this kind of operations by default (of course with some elisp-fu it's doable). The combinator orientation of vim commands is just plain cute.
