Option Shift text selection on Mac OS

[jish]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the bug / provide steps to reproduce it

Selecting text using the option key, shift, and the arrow keys is a common part of my text editing workflow. I feel that the selection behavior is not quite right when using the "base_keymap": "TextMate" configuration.

Here is an example of the behavior in Zed when pressing option + shift + left-arrow:

zed-base-keymap-textmate-option-shift-arrow.mov

Here is the exact same source code file, and keystrokes in TextMate:

textmate-option-shift-arrow.mov

Now, if I change base keymap setting to use Sublime instead "base_keymap": "SublimeText" then I get slightly different behavior:

zed-base-keymap-sublimetext-option-shift-arrow.mov

Environment

Zed: v0.129.2 (Zed)
OS: macOS 14.1.1
Memory: 16 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help explain present your vision of the feature

I believe selecting text with option shift and arrow keys should have logical stops to progressively select more and more text, instead of selecting the entire line.

textmate-option-shift-arrow.mov

If applicable, attach your ~/Library/Logs/Zed/Zed.log file to this issue.

No response

[jish]

I can fix this issue by copying the "alt-shift-left" and "alt-shift-right" configurations from Default Key Bindings to my ~/.config/zed/keymap.json:

[
  {
    "context": "Editor",
    "bindings": {
      "alt-shift-left": "editor::SelectToPreviousWordStart",
      "alt-shift-right": "editor::SelectToNextWordEnd"
    }
  }
]

Maybe this could be solved by removing the "alt-shift-left" and "alt-shift-right" overrides from assets/keymaps/textmate.json?

zed/assets/keymaps/textmate.json

Lines 41 to 52 in c7961b9

	"alt-shift-left": [
	"editor::SelectToBeginningOfLine",
	{
	"stop_at_soft_wraps": true
	}
	],
	"alt-shift-right": [
	"editor::SelectToEndOfLine",
	{
	"stop_at_soft_wraps": true
	}
	],

[JosephTLyons]

If TextMate ships with the behavior of jumping by words, rather than to the beginning of the line, we should change it to that. Hey @caius, curious what you think here. Caius did the work adding in the TextMate keymap originally, back when they keymaps were in the keymaps repository, before the Zed repository was open source.

[JosephTLyons]

Just checked - I downloaded TextMate and its default behavior is as described by @jish.

[caius]

Ha, this annoys me on occasion too. I either missed there was select to previous/next word start, or they’ve been added since we setup the keymap and I’ve not noticed.

We should remove the overrides as suggested if the default keymap behaves correctly from TextMate’s point of view.

@jish thanks for raising an issue for it, doubt I’d have noticed otherwise 🙂

[JosephTLyons]

Would we want to simply remove those? The default bindings use the same keys, but they do not explicitly set "stop_at_soft_wraps": true, as these do in the TextMate keymap.

At any rate, I've marked this as a good first issue - feel free to open a PR here, @jish. :)

[JosephTLyons]

This should be fixed now in v0.135.0-pre.

[ylluminate]

I've always used and preferred option-click-drag for selection of regions vs having to add shift to the mix. What can we do to rectify this?