Let me tell you, i (“inside”) is the motion that you MUST know.

Given "this is awesome", anywhere from the starting " to the ending one, just do a ci", you can replace anything within the quotes. This works for backtick & single-quote char as well, but not for other delimiters like "/", "|", "\", …, etc.

Given %(this is awesome), doing ci( or ci) works as well. In fact, this works equally well for ci<, ci>, ci[, ci], ci{ & ci}.

If you have installed the vim-textobj-user & vim-textobj-rubyblock plugins:

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$ cd ~/.vim/bundle
$ git clone https://github.com/kana/vim-textobj-user.git
$ git clone https://github.com/nelstrom/vim-textobj-rubyblock.git

You can do cir anywhere from start of a class ... end, module ... end, def ... end, do ... end, if ... end, … to replace the contents within.

Last but not least, you may wish to know the a (stands for “around”) motion as well. Try out ca", ca(, car & friends.

Have fun !!