There are several Kakoune keys that I don’t really understand the purpose of. For example, e extends the selection until the next end-of-word. It does exactly the same thing that E does if you only press it once. It seems like you don’t need to have e as a command and it would be more useful if it meant to move to the next end of the word without extending the selection. Then e/E would be analogous to l/L and other pairs of movement/selection commands.
The behaviour of e to extend the selection seems like a hang-over from Vim, so that you can say in Kakoune you type ed to delete until the end of the word whereas in Vim you type de.
It would be useful for navigating with f and t to go forward on a line without extending the selection.
Thanks to Reddit user “ftonneau” I was able to redefine f and t not to extend the selection:
define-command -params 1 find-character %{
# Args: 1 = count
on-key %{
exec %arg(1) f %val(key)
exec <semicolon>
}
}
map global normal f ':find-character %val(count) <ret>'
define-command -params 1 to-character %{
# Args: 1 = count
on-key %{
exec %arg(1) t %val(key)
exec <semicolon>
}
}
map global normal t ':to-character %val(count) <ret>'
https://old.reddit.com/r/kakoune/comments/1gw3mbq/basic_movement_question_from_new_user/m0fuswt/
I do not think e and E are equivalent if pressed only once. E extends whereas e does not. Admittedly, you won’t see any difference if the current selection consists of only 1 character. Try it with a selection that is more than 1-character wide, however, and you’ll see the difference between extending (E) versus merely selecting (e), even if e/E is pressed only once.
You are right. e creates a selection from the current cursor position to the end of the word, while E extends the selection until the end of the word.
I suppose e /b is a quick way to select an entire word at once to do something with that word, but it is not as useful as a quick way of moving through text because of leaving a word selected.