Vim deleting multiple words

Question

Earlier I was in a situation where I wanted to delete 3 words, with the cursor inside of the first one. For example

Vim is the best text editor

with the cursor on the h in the. I wanted to end up at

Vim is editor

I tried using 3diw to get rid of them, but that left me with

Vim is text editor

with 2 spaces between is and text. 3daw worked fine, leaving me with what I wanted, but I'm confused about why 3diw didn't work. I would have expected 3diw and 3daw to delete the same number of words, and have the only difference be diw leave two spaces and daw leave one.

So why does 3diw have this behavior?

Answer 1

you didn't understand the difference between iw and aw. with [count]diw (inner words), spaces between words would be counted as well. but they won't be counted with aw

iw          "inner word", select [count] words (see |word|).
            White space between words is counted too.
            When used in Visual linewise mode "iw" switches to
            Visual characterwise mode.

                            *v_aW* *aW*
aW          "a WORD", select [count] WORDs (see |WORD|).
            Leading or trailing white space is included, but not
            counted.

so if you want to do with iw with your example, you need press 6diw:

1 the
2 " "
3 best
4 " "
5 text
6 " "