As z92 mentioned in reply, you missed my point about the fact that EditPlus or Sublime will force you to move to the beginning of the word before you can select it. Try the above exercise in Sublime and then in Vim so that you can see the difference clearly. May be that will kick in that bulb in your head and you will see Vim in a whole different light. Trust me, it took me a long time before Vim 'clicked' for me.
As the other reply mentioned, it's Ctrl+D, and there are many other ways to accomplish the same things that Vim can do in general. Maybe one is slightly better or more efficient, but they're really not that different.
Not to get into a holy war, but that's is one of the things I don't really like about Vim—the community is pretty religious and Vim "can do no wrong" in a sense. The process of conversion is just an epiphany and if you haven't realized that, then you must just not have used it enough, because it's factually better. Not really true. I'll leave it at that.
I am sorry if you get the impression that we are trying to suggest that Vim can do no wrong.
Your original comment was exactly how I felt when I was learning Vim. I also thought that Vim is obtuse and it gets in my way. And now after using Vim for over 3 years, I now know why Vim is the way it is and I was sharing my epiphany.
By all means, use the editor which makes you most productive (you are already ahead of 70% folks who don't even care to find better editor). But at the same time, if you think that Vim is crazy, at least listen to the other side of an argument with an open mind.
PS: I also replied to comment by 'recursive' on the Ctrl + D shortcut.
I think you just embodied the entire sentiment the GP was criticising: the whole concept that Vim is not an editor; it's a state of mind.
I compel you and anyone else who is quite dogmatic about their choice of editor to try explaining it in such an objective, non-patronising way, so that the layman can think, "oh, it sounds like it's worth learning then."
I'm not a Vim user per-se, but I'd find more value in something like this, possibly with a more specific follow up:
Vim works a bit differently than other editors. It cares more about manipulating existing text than creating new text, and so it tries its best to let you make changes without just deleting and re-typing from scratch, or using your mouse to point and click and drag and highlight.
It has a steep learning curve so it's initially hard to adapt not just to this change in perspective, but also to the commands and shortcuts that allow you to be more efficient and productive.
Such is the investment of time and effort required to do be good in it, you might consider grokking Vim a commitment as big as grokking your programming language of choice. However, you will in return acquire a life-long knowledge of working in Vim, and using it will become second-nature and infinitely preferable to manipulating text by hand.
As a developer, knowledge of Vim is valuable because of two things:
1. Portable configuration: what you learn, and how you personalise your editor, is transferrable to other machines, as it's just text. No modern editor has adequately replicated such basic functionality.
2. Ubiquity: you can't load Sublime Text, Textmate, Eclipse, {$gui_editor} on the VPS you routinely SSH into. You will, however, have access to Vim, or its predecessor Vi. You can thus have a somewhat familiar environment when working on remote servers, without any faff.
I'm by no means a sublime expert, but I'd approach those scenarios like this. For replacing the inner content, Ctrl + D still works. To also replace the quotes, I'd use Ctrl + D, Del, Del, Backspace.
Yes, in the second case, Sublime is one additional keystroke. I know you could come up with examples that would show bigger advantages for vim.
FWIW I do believe that vim has advantages to some editors in certain scenarios, but I think those advantages are overestimated by the vim-inati. If you've spent years learning one editor, of course it will seem more capable than editors you have used less.
What if it's 'so called nutheads' that you want to change?
AFAIK, Sublime Text 2 doesn't provide a shortcut for that. You can do Ctrl+D to select "called" but then what? Extending selection to scope or brackets won't help and you are back to a series of Ctrl+Left -> Ctrl+Left -> Ctrl+Shift+Right -> Ctrl+Shift+Right -> Ctrl+Shift+Right. In Vim, that's ci', or ca' if you want to also remove the quotes. Hell, you don't even have to move the cursor to the quoted text to do that.
This scenario happens dozens of times in a given day around here and, as for many other little things, Vim and his "awkward" language and it's "antiquated" modality rule.
The irony, here, is that you actually can change the content of a pair of quotes in ST2.
