non-evil?

spacemacs, evil mode

emacs or vim

if you place your cursor anywhere on or inside the quotes you can do c s ' "

this is with evil-surround which spacemacs should have

mnemonically it means "change surrounding single quote to double quote"

you can also type '.' after your cursor is on another one and it will repeat the sequence

https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-surround

omg, that’s so cool. it works. Space macs rocks.

I love it

hehe, you mean "emacs rocks" but yes, spacemacs adds a lot of the best packages, makes it look like they made it themselves 🙂.

also evil-surround lets you define your own surround regexps

also, it seems to recognize ' and " when you do c s '

so you never have to press shift to match the double

what’s a good use case for using regex to replace surrounding delimeters? I am trying to learn more refactoring tricks

Depends on the language, I think evil-surround has the basics for most languages, but if you want custom ones you can add them. Maybe adding common surrounds for tags for example, though I think they have those set up already. I haven't added any, but there's a section in the docs that could shed light

maybe you want to delete a surrounding function and replace with an assignment

in the case of js