The "First-class syntactic selection" reminds me of my most used shortcut(s) in Jetbrains IDEs: the Expand / Shrink Selection.
Ctrl + W
Ctrl + Shift + W
It really changed my perspective on interacting with the 'text' of a file.
VS Code, Zed, etc. have similar operations, but in my experience they expand and shrink too coarsely.
Mine are:
Cmd+Shift+V - Stacked clipboard, you can start typing to search or hit a number to choose what to paste (keeps everything you've copied/cut inside jetbrains for a while)
Cmd+Shift+E - Recent locations, you can start typing to search - shows little buffers of where you've been recently
Cmd+Shift+A - Action tab of the command palette - fuzzy search for any command (really the only shortcut you need, other than maybe Shift+Shift for main command palette shortcut)
--- Through the Action bar...
Local History / Local History of Selection - you can start typing to search quite far back the history of all changes of the current file or selection - you can also right click a folder or the project and do the same. Much finer grained than git.
The general concept of being able to search for something and edit directly in the buffer of the search results.
Hero! I had not done my homework/have not been aware, but these all look fantastic! The stacked clipboard is something I periodically mentally complain about (Why is clipboard on every OS/tool I've used single item?)
I will add one that are possibly more well-known:
Windows has had a pretty usable stacking clipboard for a while! You just have to activate it. Since you can pin thing into it it’s also quite useful as a rough and ready way to type special characters you use frequently.
Wow. Looks to not even be a PowerToys feature. Win + V
I use shift+shift and type for all three of these.
Although i do use cmd+shift+r for global replace
Also available as `incremental selection` in Neovim via tree-sitter.
yep and most of these actions can be implemented with simple mappings based on https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-textobjec...
Mathematica is the earliest thing I am aware of with this feature where it was Alt+. to expand selection in their notebook interface starting in the early 90s. But the thing I miss most that I still can't shake the muscle memory of after almost a decade of not using much Mathematica, is that single/double/triple/n-click scaled this way as well. So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click selected all the comma-separated multiple args of a function, 4-click for f(a,r,g,s), and so on.
Ctrl-Space in TeXmacs, where the document is an actual tree (http://texmacs.org)
I work on AST based revision control. I have a stack of ideas on how to achieve the same Ctrl+W effect with commits/diffs/cherry-picks. All still in flux. If you have some thoughts to share, please do.
[1]: https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/be#readme
I use it constantly in helix too. The vscode one is meh. I think I saw a discussion in github once about switching to tree-sitter, which would improve AST-related actions. I don't think it went anywhere though.
I love AST aware editing. I think it's one reason it's always been so nice to edit lisps. Stuff that is complicated to describe in javascript (and doesn't have LSP support) p much requires a whole AST parser, but in lisp it's just a simple list operation. When I go back typescript after a weekend of clojure, I reeaally miss slurp! and other paredit commands
I agree, top feature. Combined with things like "extract method" makes mundane refactorings super fast.
One problem is I got so used to Ctrl-W that I use it in other applications and usually wind up inadvertently closing the tab.
I had this issue too, so I remapped Ctrl-W/Shift-Ctrl-W to Ctrl-\/Shift-Ctrl-\ . (Also git operations became two-key sequences, starting with Ctrl-G and that damn Ctrl-K stopped being the shortcut for commit.)
To me, it feels like Zed and VsCode perform most operations in a general way on the text; they don't seem to (in Python and Rust at least) have an understanding of the code structure in the way JB does. (And based on some digging on Ki the way it does as well?) So, I would bet they are using that text-based model, which would be hit/miss here.
Yes, Java IDEs have had these since sometime in the 2000s.
And I am sure that people have been complaining about the hand gymnastics you have to do to press those shortcuts since around that time as well
It’s still some time in the 2000s and will be for the next 974 years
Not according to common usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
JetBrains also experimented with AST-based editing: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/mps/fast-track-to-mps.html#st...
An overview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGm_khXZl44
I tried it, but it just was too clumsy. Sometimes refactoring/editing needs to go through phases where the AST is invalid, and MPS makes that just too clumsy.
But with AI this might be a different story.
This has got to be my favourite feature of IntelliJ, along with the dumb context actions menu
Cool feature. what's the key for it in visual studio code?
Expand Selection: Alt+Shift+→ (Windows/Linux) or Option+Shift+→ (Mac) Shrink Selection: Alt+Shift+← (Windows/Linux) or Option+Shift+← (Mac)
Ty! I have been missing out. Adding this to the repertoire.
Ah yes.
The shortcut I use the most in Jetbrains IDEs. Also the one I miss the most in VSCode (whatever is present there just doesn't seem to work right).
Also the shortcut that has caused me to close so many browser tabs inadvertently...