Refer to begin-of/end-of selection, like BOL/EOL (^/$)

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1

Hi all,

aim: to delete leading and trailing whitespace chars in an arbitrary selection - not to be confused with unselecting leading/trailing whitespace which is what the _ cmd does.

I can’t figure out how to do this, but the most natural solution that my mind wants to reach for is to enter selection mode and use an equivalent of ^ and $ regex ops but instead of operating on line terminals it would operate on selection terminals (which kak already knows about via the a-; a-: a-S keys). I guess some might frown upon having a kak-specific regex extension but I find myself wishing it existed fairly regularly as it’s a natural concept we use all the time to navigate and extend selections via those keys.

Please let me know if I’ve missed some obvious feature that makes the above a trivial task and/or if there’s an equally powerful primitive available for other use cases… happy to learn!

2

You might be interested in the \A and \z regex assertions, which match at the beginning and end respectively of the selected string.

3

As per Screwtapello’s reply, \A and \z are relevant. This seems to work:

  • select the starting spaces with s\A\s+<ret>
  • delete them
  • type <a-u> to restore your previous selection (it will be restored without the starting spaces you just deleted)
  • type s\s+\z<ret> to select the ending spaces
  • delete them
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4

Ahhhh… I got stuck thinking in kak terms and didn’t even think of checking the regex spec - never seen those before.

Thanks guys!

5

Aside from \A and \z, other goodies to remember are \Q and \E (see the Quoting section); they can spare you a lot of escaping pain :slight_smile:.

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6

oh that’s a good one! thanks for sharing :slight_smile: