Visual Selection

[alex-courtis]

Discussed in #2993

^{Originally posted by l00sed November 9, 2024}
First of all, thank you so much to the open source community, the plugin author, and plugin contributors. Nvim Tree is a fantastic plugin and part of my everyday workflow. 🌳

Some Background, Visual Selection

The vim-centric way to delete multiple lines of text is to first Shift-v— visually select a full line of text. Next, with the visual line selection, I could navigate (j or k) to expand the selection area down or up, respectively. See below:

Screen.Recording.2024-11-08.at.9.13.43.AM.mov

I would love to mimic this behavior for selecting multiple files in Nvim Tree, using <S-v> to visually select files or folders, then pressing c (for example, to copy) or d (to delete)— or running any action against that selection of files.

Performing the selection this way, using the standard Vim visual selection, would feel like a seamless extension of normal buffer behavior.

Example Scenario

I want to delete several markdown files from a folder, blog. The files are in consecutive order, so I can <S-v> to visually select the first file to delete (car-hacking.mdx) and then press j several times to expand the selection downward. Pressing d deletes the selected files.

Screen.Recording.2024-11-08.at.9.20.17.AM.mov

Does anyone have an existing recipe that makes this behavior possible? Perhaps using the existing buffer marking (m) behavior as a way to integrate the key-bindings somehow?

I suspect there are other people interested in this as well— or those who may have already found a solution. Funny enough, I found a stack overflow issue related to NERD Tree which was likely asked in the hope of achieving the same visual-selection behavior in this other Neovim tree-based file manager.

Other relevant discussions:

• batch delete consecutive files (discussion#2677)

[alex-courtis]

This feature would be incredible!

I've found myself naturally doing the same: <s-v> j j d
That somewhat maps to marks m j m j m bd
<s-v> j j y p to clipboard c j c j c p
A repcipe to do this sort of mapping would be a bit clunky and failure prone, and will interfere with existing functionality.

A first class solution is desirable.
We cannot use marks as they have use cases other than file manipulation.
We can use the clipboard.
As a start: perhaps:

• visual x: marks the visual selection as cut (regular x), clearing other cut and copied
• visual y or c: marks as copied, clearing
• visual d: deletes

As usual, pull requests are most gratefully appreciated, see CONTRIBUTING.md