How can I mark select text?

[Sepero]

I'm new to micro and I love many of the default keybindings. Shift-up or Shift-down I wouldn't change. But my problem is I normally use a software keyboard, and when I press Shift, then it only applies to actual type characters, and not Meta keys (Ctrl Alt Home End Left Right etc)

Besides that, with a software keyboard, it's a hassle to press Shift+key Shift+key Shift+key to create a selection.

So to my point! Is it possible for me to bind Ctrl+m to beginning Selection, and Ctrl-m a second time to end Selection? (Or something like that)

For example, Nano uses "Meta-a" to make selections.

Thank you for your great program

[Sepero]

Hi. I was just checking in to see if this had any answer yet. Best regards

[dmaluka]

Micro does not provide this feature. But fortunately, micro's Lua scripting system is powerful enough to achieve this functionality even without adding any changes to micro itself.

You can add something like this to init.lua:

local markSelection = false

function toggleMarkSelection(bp)
    markSelection = not markSelection
end

function preCursorUp(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectUp()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorDown(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectDown()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorLeft(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectLeft()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorRight(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectRight()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preWordLeft(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectWordLeft()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preWordRight(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectWordRight()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preStartOfLine(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToStartOfLine()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preStartOfText(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToStartOfText()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preStartOfTextToggle(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToStartOfTextToggle()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preEndOfLine(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToEndOfLine()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorPageUp(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectPageUp()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorPageDown(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectPageDown()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorStart(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToStart()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

function preCursorEnd(bp)
    if markSelection then
        bp:SelectToEnd()
        return false
    end
    return true
end

And then you can bind your key to lua:initlua.toggleMarkSelection, e.g.:

    "Alt-l": "lua:initlua.toggleMarkSelection",

Unfortunately, you can't bind specifically Ctrl-m, for the same reason you probably can't bind it in nano and other terminal-based editors: the terminal sends it using the same code as Enter, so the editor interpretes Ctrl-m as Enter (unless you can tweak your terminal to send some different code for Ctrl-m). So you might need to pick some other key combination.

[Sepero]

I will give it a test for sometime and report back. Thank you so much for this! I couldn't have written this lua myself ❤️

[Neko-Box-Coder]

For anyone who wants selection marking (and also work with multi-cursor), like so

See https://github.com/Neko-Box-Coder/MicroOmni/tree/master#-selection-marker