Keybinding for copying selections on matching substrings vertically

[rouanth]

A new keybinding, ^, which allows for selecting substrings that are directly above or below the currently selected one if their contents match that of the original selection.

For example:

/// Long
/// comment
/// ...
fn main() { }

If the cursor is located at the beginning of the snippet, pressing ^ causes the / at the beginning of each of the first three lines to be selected.

[danr]

This is an interesting keybinding (and I now understand what you meant with it)!
It does not need to be implemented in the C++ kakoune source though, it should be possible to get it going with some scripting.

[lenormf]

As said previously, I don't think adding this to the primitives makes much sense, it sounds too specific, better keep it as a mapping in your user configuration.

[mawww]

This is an interesting binding, but I am not convinced it has wide enough applications to warrant being a built-in, I think it should be doable through a mapping.

Do you have examples of editing problems that are cumbersome to do without that binding ? It seems in many cases C and <a-k> can be used.

[rouanth]

I've provided some use cases in the issue which this request closes: #1115. In general, I often encounter text which is distinguished by a vertical structure but isn't on a separate paragraph and doesn't have a fixed number of lines. For these cases, both C and <a-k> can be used perfectly well when editing manually; however, when doing automation with macros, C needs to know the number of lines, and the regular expressions required to do it with <a-k> in general case and without relying on its interactivity are often unnecessarily complex.

I will try to write a script that implements the keybinding, but I must warn that it can take very long for me to get to it. I guess the pull request can be rejected, but I'll leave the issue open if it's fine with you.

Thank you all for your analysis!

[alexherbo2]

https://github.com/occivink/kakoune-vertical-selection