On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 01:54:38PM +0100, Titus von der Malsburg wrote:
Hi list,
I'm using visual-line-mode and like it very much (no more M-q or gqap). However, commands like dd now delete whole paragraphs instead of just the current line. Also selecting lines in visual mode doesn't work as expected. My question: is there a way to make evil behave in the usual way when using visual-line-mode?
This is an issue we are aware of and the answer is: Maybe. The problem is that it is not always clear what a certain visual selection really selects when visual-line mode is activated. Especially block visual state is problematic, e.g, when one selects a certain block and types "c", the dynamic behavior of visual-line-mode may readjust the line so that the insertion-points in the selected lines are no longer aligned. Similarly yanking/pasting of yanked lines difficult: when some line is yanked/deleted, should it be put into the kill-ring as lines or a simple text? The former solution requires a modification of the yanked text (insertion of newlines at appropriate positions), the latter makes pasting those lines unexpected (they would not be inserted as lines but as ordinary text, this "P" would insert the text before point not in the line above point). A consistent behavior probably requires appropriate yank-handlers. That said, what you want is indeed possible but no trivial task. I would postpone it to a later version of evil and not for the upcoming 1.0 release where we should focus on stability and correctness of the current features. In the meantime, you may test the following quick hack (mainly untested) which (perhaps) implements the first approach: (evil-define-text-object evil-line (count) "Move COUNT - 1 lines down." (list (save-excursion (beginning-of-visual-line) (point)) (save-excursion (beginning-of-visual-line (1+ (or count 1))) (point)))) Explanation: `evil-line' is a special motion which simply moves point COUNT - 1 lines down. This motion used for each operator that is invoked via a "double-character" command, i.e., dd, cc, == and so on. The above redefinition makes `evil-line' (which is a line motion by default) a special text-objects which covers COUNT - 1 visual lines. But note that "dd" does not delete lines anymore but simple characters which happen to contain full lines. This means "P" and "p" do not paste above/below the current line but before/after point. Frank