Incremental selection over logical blocks

[matoous]

One things I missed in vim when I switched from Goland and other IntelliJ ides was incremental selection, I have not seen it done properly by any of the plugins (but maybe I just didn't find the right one). Would this be a feature worth adding to Helix?

[kirawi]

I'm not familiar with the keybinds, but if this is what you're talking about then I think 100% Helix is all about that. https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html

[kirawi]

Press v to enter extend mode, that's all I recall.

[matoous]

I mean: I tried, it is not possible currently afaik. I opened this discussion to discuss the idea of adding it and whether it even makes sense.

[kirawi]

You have to press a movement key like w or b to extend/shrink the selection, or a specialized key like x

[matoous]

Sorry, maybe I am just using wrong terms or explaining it wrongly. What I mean by incremental selection is selection that works over tree-sitter nodes such as parameters, function calls, function bodies etc. Basically you start at one tree-sitter node and by incrementing the selection you are traversing the tree-sitter tree upwards, towards the root (an vica versa). I updated the discussion title + description to be more specific.

[kirawi]

https://docs.helix-editor.com/usage.html#textobjects?

[sudormrfbin]

We have expand_selection which does exactly what you describe, but it's not bound to a key by default yet because we don't have a matching shrink_selection counterpart.

[matoous]

So I was playing around today trying to create shrink_selection and it seems to be quite more complicated than I anticipated.

Screen.Recording.2021-12-22.at.23.40.07.mov

I don't think there's clean way to do this without persisting the original position of the cursor and shrinking through the syntax three toward node with the cursor. I was also wondering, is it currently possible to have cursor inside selection? I.e. would it be possible to keep the cursor in the original place and expand the selection around it thus removing the need for storing the state separately? (I guess this doesn't fall into the helix design)

[sudormrfbin]

It does require some state persistence, which was why it wasn't implemented initially, and it's not possible to put the cursor in between a selection. Can you open a new PR so that there's more visibility ? There were some other ideas put forward some time ago IIRC about how to do this.

[archseer]

The idea was to store a stack we push the previous selection onto when expanding, that way shrinking can reverse the expand. If the stack is emptied out, then we select the first child node.

[archseer]

For bindings I was thinking ]o/[o since [ and ] are used for pairs

[matoous]

I gave it a shot: #1340, let's move the discussion to the PR.