vim delete till one character before the end of the line

Question

I can press $ to go to the end of the line so if I want to delete everything till EOL I can do d$ (or D). What if I want to delete till EOL column - 1 character (or - n chars more broadly)?

Example

I have a row 1234.567890 where . represents the cursor and want 1234.0 (. represents cursor again).

Answer 1

If there's no identical character in between (or the number of those is easily determined), the f and t commands are very useful, because they just involve two keystrokes (the command and the target character, possibly prepended by a [count]), and (unlike the more generic /...<CR>) they are limited to the current line. For your example, that would be dt0 then.

For more complex scenarios, before I stop and lengthily contemplate possible solutions, visual mode is a quick alternative that lets you iteratively fine-tune the area before applying the command. I think it's a great pragmatic addition to the original command set of vi. For your example, that would be v$hd.