Today I learned: How to delete until the beginning of the line including the cursor in Vim

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Five years I have been using Vim, as well as consumming various content about it such as blogs, books, screencasts, forums... Five years and I never came across this single character that may make a difference.

Inconvenience

Note: In the below text snippets, the square brackets symbolise the cursor, and the character inside these brackets, the character being under the cursor.

Let's say you have the following text snippet, and that you are in normal mode:

Today is[:]Tuesday

Now you want to delete backward until the beginning of the line.

First things that come in mind are usually the commands d^, d| or d0.
But unfortunately, here is what you are left out with:

[:]Tuesday

As you can see the character previously under the cursor is still present. This does not meet the original expectation.

The reason

The reason behind this, is that the motions used above, ^, | and 0 are defined as exclusive in Vim.

According to Vim documentation:

A character motion is either inclusive or exclusive. When inclusive, the start and end position of the motion are included in the operation. When exclusive, the last character towards the end of the buffer is not included.

In our example the "last character towards the end of the buffer" is the :, therefore it is not deleted.

The solution

Hopefully, Vim has a mean to turn an exclusive motion into an inclusive motion (and vice-versa), using the v modifier.
Here are the inclusive equivalent of the above presented commands:
dv^, dv| and dv0.

Now applying one of these commands to the first text snippets produces the following:

Tuesday

Bingo!

Beyond deletion

Since the behaviour comes from the nature of the motion rather than the operator, this can be applied to other operations too, such as change (c) or yank (y).

Below, is the use case of willing to change Today is: Tuesday to Yesterday was Tuesday, starting with the text snippet and the cursor positioned on the ::

Today is[:]Tuesday

Now, type the sequence: cv0Yesterday was and then Escape. Now you should end up with:

Yesterday was Tuesday

How to tell a motion is exclusive or inclusive?

In the Vim documentation, for each motion description, it provides its nature.
For instance here is the excerpt for the 0 motion:

0   To the first character of the line. exclusive motion.

Reference