Can you substitute or delete between commas (or any arbitrary character) in vi/vim?

Question

For example, I have text like this:

I talked to a friend, I hiked a mountain, I am working with blah blah, 

And I want to delete or substitute

Answer 1

There are a bunch of plugins that help you create custom text-objects like textobjectify.

I've had the following snippet in my vimrc for quite a while and it never failed me:

for char in [ '_', '.', ':', ',', ';', '', '/', '', '*', '+', '%' ]
  execute 'xnoremap i' . char . ' :normal! T' . char . 'vt' . char . ''
  execute 'onoremap i' . char . ' :normal vi' . char . ''
  execute 'xnoremap a' . char . ' :normal! F' . char . 'vf' . char . ''
  execute 'onoremap a' . char . ' :normal va' . char . ''
endfor

It creates all the custom operator-pending mappings required for di,, vi%, ci:, ya| and so on.

And it's easy to add new delimiters.

And I have cute smileys in my vimrc.