Select the data inserted by the ! and <a-!> primitives

[lenormf]

Hi,

It would be convenient to have the text inserted by the ! and <a-!> primitives automatically selected after they've been added to the buffer.

Thanks.

[Delapouite]

Yes. And I think this approach could be generalized.

Current situation:

• p and P inserts/appends the content of a register but keeps the selection
• <a-p> and <a-P> inserts/appends every yanked selections and select each pasted string
• ! and <a-!> inserts/appends a shell command output

Notice that only <a-p>/<a-P> have the behavior of selecting what's been inserted. It does 2 things.

As lenormf request in this issue, this "insert AND select inserted" behavior could be useful for ! and <a-!>, but I'll argue that it can sometimes also be useful for regular p and P as well.

So I think we should be consistent everywhere:

• make <a-p> and <a-P> only insert/append.
• offer an easy way to select what's just been inserted if desired.

Potential suggestion could be to store a %val{inserted_selections_desc} that is refreshed everytime one of the p or ! commands above are triggered. This way the user could add a map in his kakrc:

map global user s ':select %val{inserted_selections_desc}`

Code wise I think it should be possible because the third param of selection.insert() already provides the inserted selections like in the paste_all funcition: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/src/normal.cc#L701

[Delapouite]

Potential suggestion could be to store a %val{inserted_selections_desc} that is refreshed everytime one of the p or ! commands above are triggered

vim/neovim has the '[ and '] marks: https://neovim.io/doc/user/motion.html#'[ that delimit the beginning and the end of pasted text.

These marks are the foundation if this text-object: https://github.com/saaguero/vim-textobj-pastedtext

[alexherbo2]

Can we set the selection orientation to the left for <a-!>, so we can press h after the command to return to the previous position.