A new very cool plugin for Rubyists using Vim. RubyBlock TextObjects created by Drew Neil from Vimcasts.org. Once installed it will add the commands var, vir, sr & ir for selecting Ruby blocks, Drew Neil has explained it well on VimCasts. This vim plugin relies on two others matchit.vim and textobj-user. I believe that matchit.vim is built in to current builds of vim and only requires enabling by adding the following to you .vimrc file:

runtime macros/matchit.vim

If it is not built in to your build or you want the latest you can get a zip file from the vim scripts Uncompress it and put matchit.vim into your vim/plugin folder and matchit.txt in to your vim/doc. these are typically ~/.vim/plugin ~/.vim/doc but can be any where on thr $VIMRUNTIME, I redefine mine ot a github repo via (in .vimrc):

set runtimepath=$HOME/.unix_config/vim,$VIMRUNTIME

To add the new help files to vim help you run (using the path to you vim help files):

:helptags ~/.vim/doc

Next, textobj-user plugin which is a generic wrapper for text objects and provides no added vim functionality by itself. Installation of this plugin confused me as the zip file and github all had make files and I do not like having to compile my plugins. However after uncompressing the zip file I moved the contents of the autoload folder to vim/autoload and contents of the docs folder to vim/docs, the RubyBlock plugin seems to work so I assume that this is all that is required.

Drew Neil has distributed his plugin as a vimball (*.vba) which is the simplest to install way of distributing vim plugins. Download file from vim scripts. Open the file with vim and then :source %

$ vim ~/Downloads/textobj-rubyblock.vba
:source %

Now open a ruby file move to a line inside a block and start trying out your new commands: var, vir, ar & ir.

Thanks to Drew Neil of Vimcasts.org for creating this plugin.