Expand to word boundary if we are at a single char selection when pressing *

[magopian]

When pressing * to use the current selection as the search pattern, it would be useful to automatically expand to the whole word if there's a single char being selected.

The logic behind this is:

• in vim, pressing * automatically searches for the word under the cursor (no need to first select the word)
• it doesn't seem very useful to search on a single char selection (and if it's needed, one could still press /<the char to search> to achieve the same result)
• if more than one character is selected, only search for this selection without expanding to the whole word: keep the way it's working actually

This has been discussed on matrix with @pascalkuthe:

• my question
• Pascal's answer and suggestion

I'm working on a PR for this proposition ;)

[archseer]

You could remap this inside your user config to do miw before *

[the-mikedavis]

miw would need macro keybinds (#1383) but you can emulate it for the most part with be:

[keys.normal]
"*" = ["move_prev_word_start", "move_next_word_end", "search_selection"]

I don't want to see this as built-in behavior for *: automatic changes to the selection make it hard to reason about the behavior of these commands especially when you have multiple selections. I think it fights with the select-then-act paradgim.

[pascalkuthe]

miw would need macro keybinds (#1383) but you can emulate it for the most part with be:

[keys.normal]
"*" = ["move_prev_word_start", "move_next_word_end", "search_selection"]

I don't want to see this as built-in behavior for *: automatic changes to the selection make it hard to reason about the behavior of these commands especially when you have multiple selections. I think it fights with the select-then-act paradgim.

The description and issue title are misleading.

I suggested that * could select the entire word on matrix if:

• there is only a single selection
• that single selection is only a single word long

I only suggested this because gf already does this and a single char search is comparatively useless.
That is what was implemented in #6046.

I do agree it fights a bit with selection => action paradigm but I taught that the additional usability would be worth it here for the same reasons as in gf (searching for a single char is mostly useless as we have f/t for that)

[MilanVasko]

I'd like to add my 2 cents:

I don't want to see this as built-in behavior for *: automatic changes to the selection make it hard to reason about the behavior of these commands especially when you have multiple selections. I think it fights with the select-then-act paradgim.

I agree completely, it's a surprising behavior and makes the editor unpredictable.

Also it breaks one use case I bump into more often than I'd like - searching for unicode or malformed characters. Say I need to work with a generated SQL file which has a messed up encoding and I want to fix it. It's very practical to be able to select the malformed character, search for it in the whole file and replace it with the correct one. Pressing /<the character> doesn't cut it in this case, because I don't even know how to put that character in the prompt (except copy-pasting, which is very impractical).

I don't mind having the functionality mentioned in this issue, but please make it a separate command so that I can still use the old behavior.