Is there a way to emulate ReSharper's “extend selection” feature in Vim?

Question

ReSharper has a nice feature called \"extend selection\": by pressing CTRL+W (I think this is the default) repeatedly, you select more and more from your current ca

Answer 1

I think Jeremy Wall's heading in the right direction. And to get a little further in that direction, you might look at the "surround.vim" script from Tim Pope. A good description is available on github. Or, if you'd rather, get it from vim.org. It'll probably help you do some of the things you'd like to do, though it doesn't seem to have a feature for say, simply selecting within a tag. Let me know if I'm wrong.

Ultimately, what you'd really like is a hierarchy of enclosing text-objects. You should read up on text-objects if you haven't. A nice overview is here. Note that you can grab multiple objects in one go using counts, or do this iteratively (try vawasap}}} from normal mode).

You can also get scripts which define other text-objects, like this one that uses indentation to define a text-object. It'll work for many languages if you're formatting according to common standards, and guaranteed for python.

One annoyance is that the cursor ends up at the end of the visual block, so, for example, you can't easily select everything between some ()'s, then get the function name that precedes them...

...BUT, I just found in this post that you can change this behavior with o. Cool!

I suspect you'll find yourself more efficient being able to skip over intermediate selections in the long run.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see if anyone else comes up with a more general solution as well!