emacs equivalent of ct

Question

looking for an equivalent cut and paste strategy that would replicate vim's 'cut til'. I'm sure this is googleable if I actually knew what it was called in vim, but heres what i'm looking for:

if i have a block of text like so:

foo bar (baz)

and I was at the beginning of the line and i wanted to cut until the first paren, in visual mode, I'd do:

 ct (

I think there is probably a way to look back and i think you can pass more specific regular expressions. But anyway, looking for some emacs equivalents to doing this kind of text replacement. Thanks.

Answer 1

Here are three ways:

1. Just type M-dM-d to delete two words. This will leave the final space, so you'll have to delete it yourself and then add it back if you paste the two words back elsewhere.
2. M-z is zap-to-char, which deletes text from the cursor up to and including a character you specify. In this case you'd have to do something like M-2M-zSPC to zap up to and including the second space character.
3. Type C-SPC to set the mark, then go into incremental search with C-s, type a space to jump to the first space, then C-s to search forward for the next space, RET to terminate the search, and finally C-w to kill the text you selected.

Personally I'd generally go with #1.