looking for an equivalent cut and paste strategy that would replicate vim's 'cut til'. I'm sure this is googleable if I actually knew what it was called in vim, but heres what i'm looking for:

if i have a block of text like so:

foo bar (baz)

and I was at the beginning of the line and i wanted to cut until the first paren, in visual mode, I'd do:

 ct (

I think there is probably a way to look back and i think you can pass more specific regular expressions. But anyway, looking for some emacs equivalents to doing this kind of text replacement. Thanks.

• emacs

Here are three ways:

1. Just type M-dM-d to delete two words. This will leave the final space, so you'll have to delete it yourself and then add it back if you paste the two words back elsewhere.
2. M-z is zap-to-char, which deletes text from the cursor up to and including a character you specify. In this case you'd have to do something like M-2M-zSPC to zap up to and including the second space character.
3. Type C-SPC to set the mark, then go into incremental search with C-s, type a space to jump to the first space, then C-s to search forward for the next space, RET to terminate the search, and finally C-w to kill the text you selected.

Personally I'd generally go with #1.

as ataylor said zap-to-char is the way to go, The following modification to the zap-to-char is what exactly you want

(defun zap-up-to-char (arg char)
  "Like standard zap-to-char, but stops just before the given character."
  (interactive "p\ncZap up to char: ")
  (kill-region (point)
               (progn
                 (search-forward (char-to-string char) nil nil arg)
                 (forward-char (if (>= arg 0) -1 1))
                 (point))))

(define-key global-map [(meta ?z)] 'zap-up-to-char)           ; Rebind M-z to our version

BTW don't forget that it has the ability to go backward with a negative prefix

That sounds like zap-to-char in emacs, bound to M-z by default. Note that zap-to-char will cut all the characters up to and including the one you've selected.