What do you do when you miss ct?

[pkazmier]

If I miss my intended target with dt because of extra matching letters between my cursor and target, with mini.jump I'm able to easily see the extra characters (as they are underlined) and simply dot-repeat until I reach my target. For example, if I have the following text in a buffer with my cursor at the start of the line:

The weather is nice outside today.

To delete up to "today", I'd likely quickly press dtt, but then realize there was a letter "t" in both "weather" and "outside". No big deal as I'd dot-repeat two times until I reach "today".

I'm curious, however, what would you do if instead of dt you wanted to change text with ct in this scenario? For me, after pressing ctt, I'd curse because I missed my target, then escape, undo, and use mini.jump2d to reach "today" directly. Sure, I know that I could have used mini.jump2d in the first place. Likewise, I could have used c/today.

But I generally reach for ct first (less keystrokes in the happy path) unless I happen to notice multiple instances of my target character. Unfortunately, I frequently don't notice those resulting in my frustration and thus my question. Is there a better way of recovering from a missed ct that has eluded me?

[pkazmier]

I suppose upon the first miss with ct, I could just hit escape, dot repeat 2x, the press I to get back into insert mode. Not sure why I don't have the baked into muscle memory. Nonetheless, just wanted to make sure there is not a better way of recovering.

[echasnovski]

Unfortunately, I don't really have some kind of profound answer here other than "do what works for you".

For me personally (I think...), I usually prefer c operator to be used with textobjects (ciw, cinl), cgn, etc.) or when I need dot-repeatability. While with motion it is more dt) followed by i or vt) followed by c.

[pkazmier]

That sounds like good advice in general. Thanks for confirming that I was not missing something obvious.