Yes, it does make sense to keep them in sync, but I'm surprised to see this. S vs s have different meanings, the capital variety surrounding over full lines. I'll try out your patch.

@timcharper This is indeed a very surprising move and it comforts people to use s instead of c which does exactly the same thing. I don't hesitate to call this a design flaw in Vim mapping and it bother me that Evil-surround blindly follow this mistake.

More info here: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUMENTATION.md#the-vim-surround-case

This is not an issue for spacemacs since I will remap S to s.

By the way, nobody has ever complain about this in evil-surround so there must be an explanation.

@syl20bnr, see issue #26

Conforming to upstream behavior by default is likely to reduce surprise the most. If people want to revert the functionality with key-bindings, so be it.

I don't particularly care for the change either and wish Tim Pope stood his ground. The capital-S vs lower-case-s had consistent meaning, and now this is broken. But it happened and I'm sure Tim Pope had a good reason.

I agree with @syl20bnr, people should learn to use c instead of s. However, this should remain in sync to upstream vim-surround.

I'm not sure Tim Pope had another reason than just fixing it because it broke the workflow of a non negligible number of users. Summoning @tpope :-) What is your official reason behind it ?

You are right that the consistency with vim-surround is more important. The design decision should only concern spacemacs. Sorry for this!

Yes, it was a very common complaint, and even I, after several years of using my own plugin, would occasionally flub and surround when I was trying to substitute. I think the lack of a motion for s in normal mode makes it perhaps a better choice than c for normal/visual parity, hence why it's such an easy mistake to make, even for me.

And the s/S distinction is still there as S/gS, only I flipped things around a bit such that S is almost always the one you want, leaving gS for a more obscure, mode dependent alternative.

@tpope I see now the s parity with normal/visual modes, makes sense. That's interesting, I learnt Vim in 2010 with an s enabled surround.vim and I never updated it, so my Vim education has been made with s = surround and c = change without the substitute. Without knowing it I used vc instead of s and cc instead of S (even this one). When Matthías wrote that s did not work in spacemacs I was like oh crap! did I miss something useful in Vim ? So I checked up and was surprised that s does not bring anything new to the table. In fact, where s became S in visual mode for surround.vim, c and s do the same thing. surround is so powerful (I use it often in visual mode because of expand-region) that when I tried the fix from Matthías to revert to the true behavior of surround.vim, I just was not able to bear it, s-does-the-same-thing-as-c, why I should make surround more difficult to type ?

So my point is that your first intent with surround.vim to replace the not so useful s was the right thing to do. I won't make the same mistake with spacemacs and let s for surround and c for change. And thank you Tim and Tim for evil-surround.vim :-)

The commit removes evil-Surround-region, but it should be bound to gS in visual mode.

I noticed that; thanks. Commit 5e6bcb3 should resolve that; can you try it?

Works fine, thank you!

So now the evil's is the only implementation of vim-surround which differs in this regard. vim, idea-vim work by using S.

I use vim-editing in multiple IDEs/editors and now, because of this change, it feels really weird for me, because muscle memory thing doesn't work anymore, same key behaves differently depending on the editor...

Is it possible to include some kind of "configuration" for this behavior, so one could switch to using "s" for substitution, "S" for surround in visual mode?

Is it possible to include some kind of "configuration" for this behavior, so one could switch to using "s" for substitution, "S" for surround in visual mode?

I believe that's what the current default mappings are.

If you don't like any, you could easily change them. This is what I use (I'm not sure if it matches exactly the default):

    (evil-define-key 'operator global-map "s" 'evil-surround-edit)
    (evil-define-key 'operator global-map "S" 'evil-Surround-edit)
    (evil-define-key 'visual global-map "S" 'evil-surround-region)
    (evil-define-key 'visual global-map "gS" 'evil-Surround-region)

Hmm, for me doing vws' on some word in spacemacs currently surrounds that word with single quotes. I always expect vws to delete that word instead, and cringe inside when it doesn't :)

Thank you for suggestions, I will try.

@dimsuz here you go https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUMENTATION.org#the-vim-surround-case

@edkolev Great! Thank you!

I have one clarification though. I feel like the following statement is not completely correct for visual mode s:

s is only useful to delete one character and add more than one character which is a very narrow use case

If it was so, I wouldn't be so attached to using s in visual mode (I guess). My use case is that I often start visual mode (v), then select a word or two in this mode (vww), and only then I press s to replace those two words with something else. So in this case, 's' works on an entire selection I made rather than on first letter.

OTOH, in normal mode s is behaving exactly like you've said, and in normal mode I'd gladly use s for surround.