Mapping -Arrows to selecting characters/lines

Question

I started to use vim recently, but I miss the character/line selection methods from other text editors. By default vim maps ,

Answer 1

I've written this to be able to navigate using Alt+hjkl (and friends) and select using Alt+HJLK when both in insert, visual and normal mode.

So the same can be applied to normal arrow keys as well

let hjklfriends = ['h','j','k','l','w','e','b','W','E','B', 'n', 'N', 'y', 'Y', 'p', 'P']

" define if using alt (it works in neovim) or Escape key.
function! Meta(key)
  if has('nvim')
        return ""
    else
        return "" . a:key
    endif
endfunction

execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('h') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('j') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('k') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('l') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('b') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('w') . ' '
execute 'noremap! ' . Meta('e') . ' '

for k in hjklfriends
  execute 'imap ' . Meta(k) . ' ' . k

  if k =~ '[a-z]'
    execute 'imap ' . Meta(toupper(k)) . ' v' . k
    execute 'vmap ' . Meta(toupper(k)) . ' ' . k
    execute 'nmap ' . Meta(toupper(k)) . ' v' . k
  endif
endfor