Quickest way to change a pair of parenthesis to brackets in vim

I personally use https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround as it provides everything I could ever need, reading through the source you can see the solution is non-trivial.

A typical example:

Hello("World")

with the cursor somewhere between the (), you can type cs([ in normal mode to get:

Hello["World"]

surround.vim is easily installed with either Pathogen or Vundle, personally I prefer vundle. https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim

adding the important commented point:

cs([ adds spaces in the block, this should be cs)]

I would simply do it like this: %r]^or[.

Here's an explanation:

• f( -- put cursor on first parenthesis you want to change (if it's not already there).
• % -- jump to the matching parenthesis.
• r] -- replace the parenthesis with a bracket.
• CTRL-O -- jump back to to first parenthesis.
• r[ -- replace the parenthesis with a bracket.