This package emulates surround.vim by Tim Pope. The functionality is wrapped into a minor mode. To enable it globally, add the following lines to ~/.emacs:

(require 'evil-surround)
(global-evil-surround-mode 1)

Alternatively, you can enable surround-mode along a major mode by adding `turn-on-surround-mode' to the mode hook.

This package uses Evil as its vi layer.

You can surround in visual-state with S<textobject> or gS<textobject>. or in normal-state with ys<textobject> or yS<textobject>.

You can change a surrounding with cs<old-textobject><new-textobject>.

You can delete a surrounding with ds<textobject>.

A surround pair is this (trigger char with textual left and right strings):

(?> . ("<" . ">"))

or this (trigger char and calling a function):

(?< . surround-read-tag)

You can add new by adding them to evil-surround-pairs-alist. For more information do: C-h v evil-surround-pairs-alist.

evil-surround-pairs-alist is a buffer local variable, which means that you can have different surround pairs in different modes. By default < is used to insert a tag, in C++ this may not be useful - but inserting angle brackets is, so you can add this:

(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook (lambda ()
                           (push '(?< . ("< " . " >")) evil-surround-pairs-alist)))

Don't worry about having two entries for < surround will take the first.

Or in Emacs Lisp modes using ` to enter ` ' is quite useful, but not adding a pair of (the default behavior if no entry inevil-surround-pairs-alist` is present), so you can do this:

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook (lambda ()
                                  (push '(?` . ("`" . "'")) evil-surround-pairs-alist)))

without affecting your Markdown surround pairs, where the default is useful.

To change the default evil-surround-pairs-alist you have to use setq-default, for example to remove all default pairs:

(setq-default evil-surround-pairs-alist '())

or to add a pair that surrounds with two ` if you enter ~:

(setq-default evil-surround-pairs-alist (cons '(?~ ("``" . "``"))
                                         evil-surround-pairs-alist))

You can add support for new operators by adding them to surround-operator-alist. For more information do: C-h v surround-operator-alist.

By default, surround works with evil-change and evil-delete. To add support for the evil-paredit package, you need to add evil-paredit-change and evil-paredit-delete to surround-operator-alist, like so:

(add-to-list 'evil-surround-operator-alist
             '(evil-paredit-change . change))
(add-to-list 'evil-surround-operator-alist
             '(evil-paredit-delete . delete))

Here are some usage examples (taken from surround.vim):

Press cs"' inside

"Hello world!"

to change it to

'Hello world!'

Now press cs'<q> to change it to

<q>Hello world!</q>

To go full circle, press cst" to get

"Hello world!"

To remove the delimiters entirely, press ds".

Hello world!

Now with the cursor on "Hello", press ysiw] (iw is a text object).

[Hello] world!

Let's make that braces and add some space (use } instead of { for no space): cs]{

{ Hello } world!

Now wrap the entire line in parentheses with yssb or yss).

({ Hello } world!)

Revert to the original text: ds{ds)

Hello world!

Emphasize hello: ysiw<em>

<em>Hello</em> world!

Finally, let's try out visual mode. Press a capital V (for linewise visual mode) followed by S<p class="important">.

<p class="important">
  <em>Hello</em> world!
</p>

Suppose you want to call a function on your visual selection or a text object. You can simply press f instead of the aforementioned keys and are then prompted for a functionname in the minibuffer, like with the tags. So with:

"Hello world!"

... after selecting the string, then pressing sf, entering print and pressing return you would get

print("Hello world!")

This is due to an upstream change in vim-surround. It happened in this commit: https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround/commit/6f0984a. See the discussion in this pull request for more details: emacs-evil#48.