I have a two part question regarding mouse clicks on gvim.
1.) I would like to change my gvim double left mouse click into something similar to the windows environment (ie Notepad, Microsoft Word), wherein it: highlights the current word, and replaces it with whatever I type. This is akin to pressing 'cw' for changeword in vim.
2.) I would like my single mouse click to place a cursor upon the selected text and enter insert mode. Again like how a mouse normally behaves in Windows.
1) nmap <2-LeftMouse> ciw
You could use viw here, which will visually select the current word, but then you will still have to press c to replace it.
2) nmap <LeftMouse> <Leftmouse>i
Or replace the i with an a if you would prefer to append, rather than insert.
You can use behave mswin or so $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim so set up a lot of stuff so that it works more like a regular windows program.
The specific setting you are looking for are:
set select=mouse
this causes the mouse to start select mode instead of visual mode. Select mode causes the selection to be deleted and insert mode to be entered when a printable key is pressed.
As in Prince Goulash's answer
nmap <LeftMouse> <LeftMouse>i
will turn on a sort of click-to-type mode.
Related
This is currently how I copy code from an editor to a search field in VS code using vscodevim.
Select text in editor somehow
Right click to open up the contextual menu (since pressing Ctrl+C does not seem to work on Ubuntu, even when in input mode, and 'p' does not work in the search field) and click copy
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to open the search field
Press Ctrl+V
I'm pretty sure this is not how copying from an editor to search field is intended to work. It it the steps 1 and 2 I would like to change to something better.
What is a more efficient and vim-like sequence?
If you want to search for the word under the cursor
Ctrl-F will do the trick.
Or you can use Vim's * command, which effectively does the same, but jumps to the next occurrence right away by default.
Otherwise
If you need to use the search field for whatever reason, then the standard Vim way to copy stuff to the clipboard works, so you can yank into the * or + registers. The steps will then be:
Select text
"+y (you can create a shortcut for this combination if you want)
Ctrl-Shift-F, Ctrl-V
See also: How to make vim paste from (and copy to) system's clipboard?.
Having said that, the more obvious approach might be to use Vim's built-in search features, so after selecting the text, the remaining steps would be y: (yanking selection to the default register and opening the command-line) then / or ? (search forward or backward), then <C-v> (pasting the yanked selection to the command-line - this works only in the VSCode plugin, while in Vim you should use <C-r>").
I'm new to VIM so there might be a better way using VIM commands but for now this works pretty well.
Go into insert mode with i than select the word you would like to search for (I'm using the mouse) and than just press ctrl + f. Your search window will open as usual containing the selected word in it.
Vim always manages to clip off at least of couple of characters when I copy something from a text file, such as a public rsa key for example.
Generally, I open a text file in my computer, highlight the text, copy it to my clipboard. I go into my terminal (with Vim already open) and then:
i (for insert)
ctrl+shift+v
Am I doing something wrong?
I've double checked, and triple checked, this, and I am absolutely sure that I highlighted all of the text that I needed to copy. Other times it works fine. There does not seem to be any consistency in regards to when it happens.
Anyone experience this?
This usually happens because something in the pasted text triggers a key mapping unexpectedly. This is what paste mode is for.
Do this before pasting:
:set paste
And turn it off after:
:set nopaste
This can be annoying to type frequently, so there is a way to map it to a key combination. I use ,p for this, and have this in my .vimrc:
set pastetoggle=,p
(Yes, I use an actual comma here, not <Leader>. That's because <Leader> won't work here, as this isn't technically a mapping.)
This is a toggle, so you can use it to turn the mode on and off. It works in both normal mode and insert mode.
You do want to turn it off after the paste. Since paste mode disables your insert mappings, you don't want to leave it on all the time.
You can read more about the paste option with :help 'paste.
The annoyance of toggling to and form paste mode can be avoided by using "+p or "*p. (You're putting the quoteplus register).
More often than not, I prefer "+P, since this leaves my cursor at the end of properly formatted put. see :help quoteplus for details. So the whole workflow is:
outside of vim: copy to clipboard
inside of vim: "+P
It's the first time i noticed about the selection mode in vim when i accidentally triggered it from visual-line mode by <c-g>.
Vim already has visual mode for text selection what's the use case of selection mode, can anyone give me a hint on this?
(note: i've checked the manual page which describes it as
a resemblance of MS Windows text selection
but i still cannot quite understand why do we need any mouse actions in vim)
Select-mode is commonly used in snippet plugins such as vim-snipmate. Mappings can be created that are unique to select-mode so as not to interfere with regular visual mode behaviour.
Here is an excerpt from Practical Vim by Drew Neil:
If you are happy to embrace the modal nature of Vim, then you should
find little use for Select mode, which holds the hand of users who
want to make Vim behave more like other text editors. I can think of
only one place where I consistently use Select mode: when using a
plugin that emulates TextMate's snippet functionality, Select mode
highlights the active placeholder.
As the documentation suggests, select mode is a bit different from visual mode. Here's the commands you can do in it:
Commands in Select mode:
- Printable characters, <NL> and <CR> cause the selection to be deleted, and
Vim enters Insert mode. The typed character is inserted.
- Non-printable movement commands, with the Shift key pressed, extend the
selection. 'keymodel' must include "startsel".
- Non-printable movement commands, with the Shift key NOT pressed, stop Select
mode. 'keymodel' must include "stopsel".
- ESC stops Select mode.
- CTRL-O switches to Visual mode for the duration of one command. *v_CTRL-O*
- CTRL-G switches to Visual mode.
Otherwise, typed characters are handled as in Visual mode.
When using an operator in Select mode, and the selection is linewise, the
selected lines are operated upon, but like in characterwise selection. For
example, when a whole line is deleted, it can later be pasted halfway a line.
You can see the docs here.
What they mean by "resembles MS Windows selection" is probably that you can extend the selection with Shift+Arrows, and also that any printable characters entered will substitute the selected text and enter insert mode.
Also, see this question/answer at the vi.SE.
I use vim in xterms on Arch linux. Wanting to automatically set marks for subsequent command ranges I wrote this mapping
map <LeftMouse> mp:let g:oc=g:nc<cr>:let g:nc=getpos('.')<cr>:call setpos("'o", g:oc)<cr>:call cursor(g:nc[1], g:nc[2])<cr>
but now the mouse no longer places the cursor at the clicked location. How can I keep standard mouse function, and add to it rather than replacing it?
It seems its not possible to modify LeftMouse, but you can achieve the effect of it using LeftRelease. So my mapping does what I want as
nmap <LeftRelease> mp:let g:oc=g:nc<cr>:let g:nc=getpos('.')<cr>:call setpos("'o", g:oc)<cr>
and the standard function of is unchanged.
You can :set mouse=a for using visual select mode. (This is not what you wanted but it is a trick).
Then, click on text, you will see that it is getting selected. Then, you can release it.
A mapping like
:map gv ma
will set the last recently selected text as mark a.
Other way:
Instead of :set mouse=a, you can press v and then select a letter or a word, depending upon your convenience and then ma for marking it as mark a.
A short mapping for it will be
:map vly ma
In using vim on Linux at the terminal I expect mouse selection to behave as (e.g.):
Start insert mode
Select some other text with left mouse button
Click middle button
Selected text gets pasted in where I was inserting
I think of this as "normal terminal mouse behaviour", and expect it to work like that for all programs, not just vim. However, something changed in the past few days and vim now acts differently:
Start insert mode
Select some other text with left mouse button
My insertion point now moves to the start of the selection
My mode is changed from "Insert" to "(insert) SELECT"
Click middle button
Looks like nothing happened, but I think it has actually pasted the selection on top of itself, because if I click again the selected text appears a second time after the selection.
One other symptom: The mouse cursor is now an arrow when pointing at a vim terminal window. Other terminal windows show an I beam, and vim used to do that too.
This is a problem with vim, not terminal because
It behaves the same in Gnome terminal, Konsole, and Terminator
Other programs at terminal behave the "normal" way
I have tried changing settings for :behave, :set selectmode and :set mouse, but this has not helped (maybe I just haven't found the right combo yet?).
This problem is recent (this week), but I have not changed my vim settings relevantly in that time.
Any ideas as to what's going on here?
The command :set mouse=a suggested should enable mouse integration in all modes but this is not what you want. To stop VIM messing with the mouse settings use :set mouse= (with no letters after the equals) to prevent it from changing the mouse in any mode.