"The vim-surround plugin is so useful that it should probably be built into Vim."

I couldn't agree with this more. Also undotree [1] should be built into Vim as well. Vim represents undo/redo under the hood as a tree, which is absolutely incredible once you have a plugin that unlocks it, but the built-in facilities for traversing that tree could be charitably described as "dismal".

Vim's undo tree makes a solved problem out of the old "undo undo undo undo undo... ok what did this file used to look like... redo redo y... oops did I just press 'y' by accident instead of redo and blow away a bunch of my later edits... next time I should remember to commit before I do that (even though I totally won't)" situation, but without the plugin, it's effectively inaccessible.

  [1] https://github.com/mbbill/undotree

[1]: https://github.com/mbbill/undotree