I think you didn't quite understand what you were seeing in that video. That's a person showing off a quick plugin/function they made for vim that when called

I think you didn't quite understand what you were seeing in that video. That's a person showing off a quick plugin/function they made for vim that when called can switch things defined from one state to the opposite state. The top half of their screen is the source to what they wrote (I think, on mobile). They are showing how it works, so as an example highlight/select manually a bit of text then manually run it to show it swapping the value. There's a few things to consider here: - They are typing it out because the are demoing it and that's the name it's defined as in the code. Normally someone adding it would also add a key combo activation for it if they planned on using it often in that manner, and make it work on the word element under the cursor. - Even if a key combo wasn't added, they could also use this while selecting a larger chunk of text to switch all occurrences of one thing the the opposite. - The real usefulness for this is more likely in the case of some well formatted JSON, where you could start a macros, search for the next top level object, they search for a specific key in that object you know is the next occurr nice of a search term, then go to nth item, then run switch (maybe even typing it out). Then stop the macro. You can then rerun that macro with 1 (or at most a few) key presses the number of times you want, to perform those complex actions a defined number of times. As needed, vim is like an extensible interactive sed command. That doesn't mean I never use vim, but being able to do something similar to the text manipulations I do with sed while withing the file to confirm it worked right and undo if needed is sometimes useful. Could the JSON example above have been done with a dedicated tool? Sure. But it gets more complex for dedicated tools if the JSON is embedded in something else, and the important idea is not JSON editing, but that vim gives you a toolset that works just as well for XML or source or plain text, as the primitives it works with generally map well to how we use text.